Page:The battle for open.pdf/56

 CHAPTER 3

One must be prepared to fight for one's simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all ­manner of glamorous enticements. —

In Chapter 1 the argument was put forward that we have witnessed the transition of openness from peripheral interest to mainstream approach in higher education. This transition brings with it a new set of tensions and issues, as was seen in the analogy of political revolutions and the green movement. Having explored the concept of openness in more detail in the previous chapter, the next 5 chapters represent the core of the argument set out in Chapter 1. Each chapter will take an aspect of open education and detail how it has been successful and the key challenges it now faces. This commences in this chapter with a very successful aspect of open education, namely open access publishing.

In the battle for open, open access (OA) publishing is probably the area with the longest history. It's worth looking at the issues that are arising here before considering other aspects of open