Open access: The whipping boy for problems in scholarly communication—A response to the rebuttals

Abstract

In this paper, we respond to five rebuttals to Kingsley and Kennan (2015). Four researchers in the information systems field and a university library director of research infrastructure provided these rebuttals. Almost without exception, the rebuttals from the information systems researchers take an analytical approach to the question of scholarly communication in their field. However, in undertaking their individual analyses of scholarly publishing or communication, they do not directly address the issues raised in our original debate piece. The rebuttal from the university library administrator (Groenewegen, 2015) alone directly addresses the discussion points raised in the original debate. As researchers in the field of scholarly communications, while this was not how we originally envisioned the debate, the rebuttals as a body of work have opened up some interesting themes, which we explore in addition to responding to the individual rebuttals.