It’s been whirlwind year for open access. Around this time last September I referred in a post on this blog to the lack of disruption in scientific publishing. My chief source for this remark was Michael Clarke’s post of Scholarly Kitchen from 2010. The subject was discussed a few weeks later at that year’s Semantico Symposium event and none of the very knowledgeable people around the table demurred from the basic picture painted by Clarke. True, a change in the attitude of UK funding councils against impact factor of journals in assessing the quality of university departments was mentioned as something that could have a future disruptive effect. However the next assessment this might affect was not until 2014. In general however, the view held that OA looked like a bit of slow-burn thing. One year on, things look very different – from a UK perspective at least. Scientists are in active revolt, governments and high-profile funding bodies have weighed in with their support, and a subject previously of interest only to those within the publishing industry and academe is now all over mainstream media. It’s interesting to review the timeline of events that have changed the landscape so radically in such a relatively short space of time. Continue reading →