– The NotA Collective

We ended Part I by acknowledging the willingness of large publishing corporations to adopt Open Access (OA) publishing protocols, if only in name, in response to widespread demand for it by researchers across the globe. To some, this may seem encouraging. It might even suggest that the publishing industry can be reformed. Indeed, much of academia — being as it is an inexhaustible fount of unbridled idealism — continues to entertain the notion that these companies, when threatened with resignations and boycotts by editorial boards and referees, will succumb to public pressure, renounce their profit-seeking ways, and make access to knowledge free for all.

What motivates this abundance of optimism is unclear, and we will not speculate on this here. Rather, our goal in Part II of this essay will be to better understand academic publishing. We offer the reader two analogies to demonstrate the defects in the current modus vivendi of academic publishing and then discuss the revolutionary departure from it that Sci-Hub and Libgen represent. These will serve as a reminder that appearances can be deceiving, and form is not essence.

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