Of hopes, villains and Trojan horses – Open Access academic publishing and its battlefields

In this doctoral research proposal the author deals with "Open Access", a vision of a free online availability of scholarly journal literature that has been put forward in the early 2000s. More than a decade later, Open Access has gathered momentum and became a widespread phenomenon with several (inter-)national strategies currently being pursued towards a radical transformation of the academic publishing world. Should the extreme scenario as proposed by some actors succeed, budgets of academic libraries would be fully shifted from conventional journal subscriptions model ("pay-to-read") towards publishing all research articles in Open Access journals ("pay-to-say"). However, the effects and dynamics that such a transition would unleash in the global knowledge regime remain largely unexplored. In order to answer the research questions, ongoing negotiations on Open Access publishing between the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and the academic publisher Elsevier as well as Dutch researchers' perceptions on the implications of these negotiations for their own publication practices will serve as empirical basis. Situational analysis developed by Adele E. Clarke (2005) will be used as an overall frame for data collection and analysis