This is in response to the post of Prof. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay. Let me begin with thanking him for responding to my earlier post. I do not think Ms Elbakyan will be cowed down by the big publishers. She seems to be far too smart for that and she seems to believe what she is doing is right. The fact that a very large section of academia around the world (including in North America and Europe) is using the service she provides is testimony to the tacit support she has from around the world. Thousans of people are indebted to her! Of course, she cannot visit the US (and possibly some western countries closely allied to the US) where she could be arrested and incarcerated. In contrast, Aaron Swartz was living in the US and he happened to be the pioneer; Elbakyan would have had the benefit of learning from the experience of Aaron. At the end of his missive, Prof. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay has posed three questions. Dark OA is *NOT* taking over OA even in science and scholarship. Beginning with arXiv, which was started in 1991, we have more than a dozen preprint servers now catering to fields ranging from biology to social sciences. Sure, most of them are in the early stages and will take a while to attain the level of maturity of arXiv, but sooner or later they will. DOAJ has more than 9,450 fully OA journals. There are many institutional and national repositories although many of them are not fully interoperable (for which the LIS community should take the blame). I don't think 'romanticism' and similarity to 'Robinhood'-kind of robbing the rich to help the poor have anything to do with scholarly communication. While people do research, they need to access some literature and seek the best option to access the literature. Publishers, of course, harp on ethics and morals, but, in the first place they have lost the right to do so by usurping the copyright to the content of research from the researchers. There is no such thing as 'delayed OA.' Please see Peter Suber's definition of OA which emphasizes 'immediate.' The solution lies perhaps in moving away from the current journal system, which had started going against the interest of the researchers ever since Mr Robert Maxwell stepped into the business of journal publishing, to the preprint and post refereeing system (a la arXiv). Best wishes. Arun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.