Open Access

Blog posts and resources relating to Open Access in the social sciences

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The Foundational Myths of Open Access Still Shape How We View It

Drawing on research into the early OA discourse of the 1990s, Corina MacDonald argues that many of the original optimistic arguments in favor of open access continue to shape open access to this day, often in ways that obscure the reality of digital networked labor.

6 months ago
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One seat of railroad tracks comes to an abrupt end

How Three False Starts Stifle Open Social Science

Patrick Dunleavy argues that there have already been three false starts in open science: focusing only on isolated bits of the open agenda in ways that don’t connect and so are not meaningful; loading researchers with off-putting, external bureaucratic requirements; and risking reopening ‘sectarian’ divides between quantitative and qualitative social scientists.

9 months ago
846

Can We Have Open Science Where No Scholar Is Left Behind?

While the dominant model of open access using article processing charges lowers financial barriers for readers, it has erected a new paywall at the other end of the pipeline, blocking access to publication for less-privileged authors.

2 years ago
2388

Size Still Matters: Discoverability, Impact and ‘Big’ Journals

One of the proposed advantages of open access publication is that it increases the impact of academic research by making it more broadly and easily accessible. Reporting on a natural experiment on the citation impact of health research that is published in both open access and subscription journals, Chris Carroll and Andy Tattersall, suggests that subscription journals still play an important role in making research discoverable and useful and thus still have a role to play even in open publication strategies.

3 years ago
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