Björn Brembs

A recent [OASPA guest
post](https://oaspa.org/guest-post-the-fully-oa-agreement-an-essential-component-of-a-diverse-open-access-world/)
reminded me of something I have been wondering about for several years
now. What sinister time travel device is keeping some sections of the
scholarly ecosystem from leaving the past and coming back to the
present? The guest post only stands in for many international examples
of what most of the discussions about "Transformative Agreements"
reverberate around and only serves as the latest prompt for me to
finally jot these observations down. There are three things these
discussions on transformative agreements have in common and that crop up
time and again:

1.  They all seem to treat access to the literature as if it still was a
    problem. Before \~2013 or so, it still was a major problem. It's
    2021 now and access is not such a big deal
    [any](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/)
    [more](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2019/10/scholarship-has-bigger-fish-to-fry-than-access/).
2.  They mostly seem to implicitly assume that scholarly articles must
    be expensive. That may have been the case for subscription articles.
    It's 2021 now and one can actually look up
    [prices](https://research.sci.pe/bogich2016)
    [online](https://peerj.com/preprints/27809/) and find out that we've
    been overpaying by a factor of around ten.
3.  These discussions also universally seem to tacitly endorse the
    perspective that the journals they want to 'transition' are somehow
    actually worth transitioning. That may have been a quaint but
    admirable position before the so-called 'replication crisis'
    emerged, but today it is 2021 and we know our
    [journals](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full)
    are a major contributing
    [factor](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full)
    to unreliability.

So, to me, it appears some pernicious time machine must be keeping them
from entering the present. Which bold superheroine can travel back in
time and bring them home into the present?

If participants in these discussions could be brought to acknowledge
that 2021 is actually a thing that is happening right now, certainly
they would be headed in a completely different direction, one would
hope?


A recent OASPA guest post reminded me of something I have been wondering about for several years now. What sinister time travel device is keeping some sections of the scholarly ecosystem from leaving the past and coming back to the present?

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

What sinister time machine?