People interested in open access should read this article, but it should be read with a grain of salt. Authored by Rick Anderson, a longtime Scholarly Kitchen author critical of open access, it depicts Richard Poynder, a longtime commentator on open access, as having recanted and declaring that open access has failed. There's nuance in Poynder's words that can be lost in Anderson's framing. For example, it wasn't that open access was a bad idea, rather, we "saw responsibility for OA pass to organizations whose interests are not necessarily in sync with the objectives of the movement... This allowed publishers to co-opt OA for their own purposes, most notably by introducing embargoes and developing the pay-to-publish gold OA model." Similarly, "While many researchers were willing to sign petitions in support of open access, few proved willing to practice it voluntarily." More: "I have seen claims that OA was in fact never about costs, which is simply not true. Indeed, the affordability problem was one of the primary drivers of the OA movement."
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