I remember the moment it happened. It was a long moment, maybe ten years long. At one point I was sitting as an acting Senator in a major university’s legislature when a presentation was given by the head of the library, asking, begging, people to start publishing in peer reviewed journals that were Open Access. I had spent the morning sorting a list of journals in my field into the categories, 1) keep or I quit; 2) keep if possible and 3) I won’t notice if you don’t keep, but keep anyway.

That was near the end of the moment. Near the beginning of the moment, a decade earlier, I was at a meeting of a small but important learned society, and we were being given a presentation by a representative of one of the dozen or so well established academic publishers that normally published books, but now was starting to publish journals.

“Let us publish your journal,” they said. “It will be cheaper and easier than what you have now,” they told us. “If we publish your journal, for the next five years, your members will have subscriptions that will be discounted way below what they pay now,” we were led to believe. Continue reading ResearchGate Under Law Suit Threat →