As I've said, it's hard to think of any academics or scholars I know who are opposed in principle to open access of scholarly research. And the degree of this commitment is, in my experience, quite generational; my peers in graduate school speak passionately about moving to an assumption of open access for all, almost without exception. Despite the popularity of this change, I'm not assuming that it is certain or will be easy. What we're talking about is a structural change, and it will take a lot of major work to make it happen. One of the most important of these changes is our perceptions of the relative prestige of open access and online journals, and particularly where those perceptions have teeth: in hiring committees and tenure reviews. There, I think the strong commitment among younger scholars to open access will (eventually) have a clear impact. I also think that eventually, the older journals are going to feel more and more pressure to move to open access as well. Where the money comes from to continue operations will be the big question, and probably the big battle.
To make this move, people need tools, which is why I find Scalar so interesting. Check out the video
The resistance will come, most likely, not from not-for-profit institutions like JSTOR, which I could see surviving under a different funding scheme, but from the for-profit publishers like SAGE and Elsevier. I don't know future there is for them, although they are powerful interests, and like all organizations they will fight to survive. My assumption is that the transition to open access will be far easier in fields like my own than in STEM fields, and they are the ones with money and influence. Whatever the case, we've got to be prepared to fight for this. It's worth fighting for.
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