of the content under an open access licence (which they or others then do not need to purchase).
In the US in particular there has also been a movement to create Open Textbooks, through initiatives such as OpenStax. These aim to create open access textbooks for core subjects such as statistics, and thus remove the considerable cost of buying text books for undergraduate students. Open textbooks overlap with OERs, so we will look at them in more detail in the next chapter.
This is not to suggest that any of these approaches is the ‘correct’ path to pursue but rather to illustrate possible models of open access publishing. What all these approaches have in common is that openness is central to their approach, it is not an attempt to (often begrudgingly) graft open access onto existing practices, with the aim of disturbing these as little as possible.
Conclusions
The intention of this chapter was not to provide a comprehensive account of open access publishing models, licences and economics, but rather to illustrate how open access demonstrates many of the key characteristics of the battle for open. The first of these characteristics is the considerable victory of the open access approach with it being mandated in several countries, and increasingly popular amongst academics. The second is that these changes are driven by the general principles of openness we saw in the previous chapter, such as the freedom to reuse digital, networked content, ethical arguments for openness and openness as an efficient model.
The third characteristic is the downside of this victory, with new areas of tension and conflict, as represented by debates around
