Interview with Stevan Harnad - 2010 the Tipping Point for Universal Open Access?

Open access advocate Stevan Harnad looks back over the progress made by the OA movement to date, in a detailed and far-reaching interview with Richard Poynder for Information Today. Harnad speculates as to whether 2010 will see the tipping point needed to usher in universal open access, with the aim of getting the 2.5 million articles a year that are published in 25,000 peer-reviewed journals all freely available online.Harnad is realistic in his assessment of the progress made to date: "...the history of OA so far has been one of gratuitous over-reaching that has not only netted little, but it has failed even to grasp what has already been well within reach for some time: free online access to refereed reseach." But he is cautiously optimisitic about the initiatives underway in 2010.