In recent years, the dramatic growth of open access to the literature has quite reasonably been hailed as a major success, which it most certainly has been in these terms. It is difficult to deny the impact that policies have had on facilitating this growth, not forgetting the investments that institutions have made is developing systems and cultures that support the stated purpose of open access.

In actuality, however, open access is far more complicated than this. Open access has a broad range of lineages and histories as Sam Moore has unpicked and emphasised. This disparate politics that these differences imbue is incredibly significant if we are to assess the contemporary successes and failures (and problems, etc.) of open access.

Some advocates of open access refer to open access as a “movement.” This can seem simplistic as it homogenises the disparate politics of various stakeholders. Issues such as pedagogy, gender, race, coloniality, and economics sometimes propel a particular drive or approach towards open access. Conflating the rationales of these heterogenous entities into one singular movement seems somewhat limiting, and fails to understand the legitimacy of different routes that any of these could take towards achieving their goals. This is where the benefits that of open infrastructures may be forgotten in the quest towards simply ‘achieving’ open access: distributed infrastructure of open repositories, and open publishing platforms afford opportunities to have multiple open accesses. It is important to remember that different forms of open access are a strength rather than a weakness.

The theme of this years open access week is  ‘Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion’. This gives pause for thought on the politics of open access. I have previously spoke to the problems with how contemporary usage of “open” within our extant political and governance systems is fraught with issues that have allowed openness to be appropriated for many of the purposes I have championed it as a move against. As we consider the role open access in relation to challenging structural inequality- something I earnestly believe it can- we must ask ourselves what open is before we can understand how it might challenge social and political inequity.

For instance, colleagues at Kent have recently published their access statement for their repository, KAR. This is a comprehensive statement articulating the roadmap that KAR is on towards making KAR more functional to a wider range of users. Importantly, it is not about ‘solving’ or ‘fixing’ things per se, but it is about honestly and openly discussing the intention and the current issues in the process of making their repository more inclusive. We are similarly progressing this with GALA, and are currently liaising with our vendor to help identify the current status of GALA in this regard and I look forward to sharing something more concrete on this with you in the future. This is important because it highlights that we are thinking beyond operational issues in relation to open access policies with a more considered focus on people, and I would like to take this forward in a range of broader and deeper ways.

I have a strong interest in digital privacy as a human right. This may seem antithetical to open access, but openness and privacy are the obverse of one another, and thus one necessitates the other. I have previously discussed the issues of digital surveillance in relation to open access repositories, and have tested EOTK on various open services to make them available as onion services. Recent issues around personal data from social media has been used have made more of us aware of the underlying risks that exist as a result of merely using online services, and scholarly autonomy, privacy, and security necessitate that we consider how we might be able to support this to ensure that open access is inclusive and safe.   

For open access to build structural equity and inclusion, it needs to be more than achieving compliance rates of 80% against a policy. We need to articulate the politics of our respective personal approaches towards open access and openness, and how this interacts with out institutional approaches to open access.