Open Access Movements: Emancipation or Hypocrisy?

Abstract

Access movements and the fact that some prestigious universities and research institutions declined to renew their subscriptions at major academic publishers.The most famous example here is the German Project DEAL 1 where dozens of leading German institutions quit their former agreements with global publishers to enter into a contract that entails golden Open Access (OA) function; meaning that the authors or their institutions will be charged to pay paper processing fees for the Publishers.In this short letter, I will try to point out some ethical problems regarding the abovedelineated plans.Hungary, this relatively small semi-peripheral country joined this global movement in a very radical way.As opposed to the German, American and Swedish participants of the OA movement, Hungary abolished all its contracts with Elsevier, including not just ScienceDirect but also Scopus and SciVal.Moreover, Hungary did it in a very radical manner since the services mentioned above are inaccessible in all Hungarian institutions: as opposed to the glorified German example, where Scopus and SciVal could be accessed from many institutions and even from public libraries, Hungary cut its access entirely.Since I am the one who started the argument against this blindfold action publicly, 2 I felt that I must make my arguments clear in front of the global audience, and with this, I would like to attract attention to some very hypocritical statements regarding the OA movement.First of all, one should clearly see that such a thing as free work does not exist in the world-system of global academy, where academic capital is accumulated in not just material but also symbolic forms.Thus, it is rather displeasing when global hegemons of the world of transnational academy state that the beneficiaries of the OA movements will be the scholars of the developing or peripheral countries.As against this musical but unfortunately false statement I have two arguments.First, in the case of a golden OA model, authors or their institutions should pay processing fees that vary from 1.500 to 5000 USD or even more.Of course, the institutions of

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