Is Open Access a Moral or a Business Issue? A Conversation with The Pennsylvania State University Press

Posted by: bluesyemre | July 12, 2012

Is university research being held captive by morally suspect for-profit academic publishers charging exorbitant prices for journal subscriptions? Since the start of 2012, this caricature of academic publishing has captured headlines within higher education news. In February, academics boycotted publishing giant Elsevier in protest of its support of the Research Works Act, which would have prevented federal agencies from requiring that their funded research be made publicly available. Similarly, the Harvard library published an open memo to its faculty, urging its faculty to publish in open access journals as it could no longer afford to pay for expensive journal subscriptions.