Open Access: Should one model ever fit all?

Publication of academic research serves four primary functions; archiving, registration, dissemination, and certification of the research. [...]around 20 years ago, all four functions were mostly bundled together through publication in print media that were fairly uniform in process, though widely diverse in subject and geographical coverage, and with the end point being a research paper in a bound journal. Responses to the challenges of closed access and affordability of scholarly publishing have come to be conflated under the broad banner of the open access movement, which began with a series of declarations in Budapest in 2002, and Bethesda and Berlin in 2003. Since these declarations there has been a diversity of OA initiatives globally. [...]focusing only on the cost of access to knowledge nowadays misses the many advantages there are to making research freely available and reusable. In the United States, the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama issued a requirement for all Federal Agencies with annual research and development expenditures over $100 million to make the published results of their research openly available, through a variety of approaches, within 12 months of publication.