Criticisms of Michael Parker’s Arguments on the Openness of Open Access Publishing

Criticisms of Michael Parker’s Arguments on the Openness of Open Access Publishing

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that Michael Parker's argument regarding open access publishing which claims that applied ethics scholars ought to prefer open access publications is flawed. 

The argument of Parker (2013) is that ethicists and those engaged in public ethics ought to be firm advocates of making empirical and normative literature available. According to him, open access publication will enable a critical evaluation of all normative arguments regarding morality. He adds that public reason is impoverished when access to essential ideas is limited. Therefore, open access to publications enables applied ethics scholars to relay public reason richly, according to Parker. 

Michael Parker’s account of open access publications regarding applied ethics scholars is flawed because it does not consider the costs associated with publishing the papers in open access publications. It is very accurate that providing open access publications is vital to the consumers and will help applied ethics scholars to relay all the moral questions to the public hence enriching the public’s knowledge on issues dealing with morality. However, it should be noted that the costs to finance the open access have been shifted to the authors. Several ethics scholars from low-income environments cannot reasonably participate in collaborative ethics research. In this case, individuals should reasonably make the authorship favor authors from low-income regions. One thing that individuals should do is to make everyone contribute according to their level of income to avoid being unfair to authors with fewer resources. 

Additionally, Open access should promote a sustainable collaboration. In this case, authors need to have enough resources to participate in partnerships that encourage more profound research in ethics. Applied ethics scholars, having limited resources, cannot raise the required amount to promote a sustainable collaboration hence indicating flaws in open access publications. The publications should allow the author to charge a minimum amount from their journals to finance them during their ethics research. The amount received by these authors may enable them to take part in significant collaborations that may increase visibility and knowledge of ethics and morality. Publishers may wave some fees to the authors to ensure a fair partnership between authors. 

Therefore, the study can confirm that applied ethics scholars should prefer open access journals if it guarantees fairness in terms of costs associated with publishing. For authors from all backgrounds to feel fairly represented, there should be a waiver of fees related to publishing, or the payments should be restated fairly so that they be distributed according to the socioeconomic class of the author. It will motivate the authors to engage in collaborative ethics research leading to an expansive knowledge of moral questions. Finally, it should be noted that ethics is rooted on fairness and without fairness then it is no longer ethics. Applied ethics scholars can only contribute to public reason if it starts from the publishers. It means that publishing of the journals in open access publications should be genuinely fair for every author for them to be forced to prefer to open access journals.         

References

Parker, M. (2013). The ethics of open access publishing. BMC Medical Ethics, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6939-14-16