Gold Open Access: my heart says yes but my head says no

摘要

It's been hard to ignore the great OA (Open Access) debate recently. The whole affair, previously regarded by many as a rather technical academic issue, has rapidly become the stuff of current affairs, politics and even the odd newspaper headline. Ministers have spoken, conferences have taken place and many of the great and the good have made pronouncements on the subject. Recently (28-29 November 2012) what might possibly come to be regarded as a seminal OA conference took place at the RSS. Run by the Academy of Social Sciences and entitled 'Implementing Finch' (hereafter abbreviated to 'ACSSIF Conference'), it brought together a large number of stakeholders from every part of the OA arena including authors, research leaders, learned societies, publishers, academics, funders, copyrighters and lawyers. Dame Janet Finch (author of the Report discussed below) played a key role and gave very generously of her time to answer questions and join the debate. So what came out of the Finch report, were its recommendations good or a bad, where are we going and what's the future of OA publishing? This article attempts to summarise the key issues and give an opinion about how we should try to address this undeniably difficult and elusive problem.