Open Access Week 2013: The Time For Reform Is Now

Today kicks off the sixth annual global Open Access Week. Open Access Week is at once a celebration and a call to action. Universities, libraries, organizations, and companies are hosting events all around the world to promote the ideals of open access: free, online availability of and unfettered access to scholarly works.

This year's Open Access Week is a special one. After many years of collective effort, we are very close to real reform on the federal and state level, and more and more researchers are taking steps, as individuals, to improve public access to their work.

Standing in the way of progress, however, is the publishing industry—the only industry that stands to gain from the status quo—which from the beginning has tried to subvert the push toward open access through deceptive campaigns and faulty self-regulation.  As momentum for reform builds, the industries that have propped up our broken model of scholarly publishing for centuries are fighting back harder than ever.