Between Pragmatism and Idealism - A Discourse Analysis on Project DEAL with focus on the term "Open Access"

Against the background of continuously rising licensing costs for scientific literature, an international discussion is going on about the open access transformation of the scientific publication system. This article considens a prominent example of this debate: It examines the specialist discourse on the negotiations between the Project DEAL initiative and the three largest international academic publishers, Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. The analysis focuses particularly on the concept of "Open Access" with its various implications and interpretations. Using theoretical categories from the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) and Critical Discourse Analysis, more than 200 online available documents were systematically contextualised and analysed. The most important discourse phenomena and problems are worked out from the texts. A list of the actors involved in the discourse and a chronicle of discourse-relevant events serve as contextualization. The discourse analysis reveals that in the debate around Project DEAL financial issues and concrete implementation models are the primary focus of dispute, while ethically motivated arguments and issues play a subordinate role.