Zugang für alle? Rhetorik und Realität der Open Access‑Initiativen.

The initiative to make the scholarly literature, whose production is in most cases financed by the public hand, freely available to the general public, was started by the Budapest and Berlin Declarations (2002 and 2003). It was widely appreciated and resulted in the development of a robust infrastructure for the recording, distribution and archiving of this type of publicaton. In recent years, however, this institutionalisation proved itself more successful than the call for participation from the actual scientific community. The main players nowadays are libraries, university managment and agencies for research funding. This outcome has disappointed the initial promotors of the initiative, but one of the reasons is precisely their own approach. It disregards, as one observes in hindsight, the existing sozio-economical infrastructure of scientific publishing and the associated interests of working scientists. The impulse has, therefore, made quite an impact in the realm of scholarly publications, but paradoxically in favor of those powerful publishing houses against it was originally directed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]