Open Access
Open Access
For an update of trends in 2006: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-07.htm
Characteristics of Open Access
Open Access, as defined by Peter Suber in his Open Access Overview (excerpt):
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
- OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions). The PLoS shorthand definition —"free availability and unrestricted use"— succinctly captures both elements.
- There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. Some permit derivative works and some do not. But all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing price barriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough.
- Here's how the Budapest Open Access Initiative put it: "There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
- Here's how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...."
- The Budapest (February 2002), Bethesda (June 2003), and Berlin (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I call refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the BBB definition.
- While removing price barriers without removing permission barriers is not enough for full OA under the BBB definition, there's no doubt that price barriers constitute the bulk of the problem for which OA is the solution. Removing price barriers alone will give most OA proponents most of what they want and need.
- In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full-text, not just to abstracts or summaries.
(See the rest of this document at http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm)
Open Access Infrastructures
“Today Open Access infrastructure comes in several forms. Of course there is some self-archiving by the authors but throughout the conference this has not even been mentioned. The next step of concentration are institutional repositories where a scientific institute gathers the publications of that institute." (http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ReportBerlin4)
Typology
"Two models. The first is a system in which the author of an academic paper pays a journal publisher for his or her peers to review the research, and for the publishing team to edit the work and market the research. In reality, it is not the academic who would pay but the organisation that funds the research, such as the British Heart Foundation or a research council. The Public Library of Science, the US-based publisher of scientific and medical journals, announced it would adopt this model in 2002 to give its scientists more choice and control over the way their work was published.
The second is a system in which an academic posts his or her research paper on the university's database - known as a repository - for all academics and the general public to see via the internet once the paper has been accepted by a journal. This is known as "author archiving"." (http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2011324,00.html)
Open Access Initiatives
Declarations
Budapest Open Access Initiative
• February 2002 • http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml • Probably the first initiative also probably coining the term "Open Access" to a wider audience.
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
• June 2003 • http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm • Has some stronger focus on the money side.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
• October 2003 • http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html • Restricts paper copies to those needed for private use. • Includes the topic of cultural heritage in parallel to scientific information
These declaration are also known as the BBB declarations.
Scientific institutions can sign these declarations to demonstrate their support of Open Access. (http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ReportBerlin4)
The DC Principles, at http://www.dcprinciples.org/
Open Access in Science: Progress report
By Derek Law
URL = http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/law/
"The Open Access debate has made much less marked progress in the last decade. The tireless proselytising of a host of John the Baptist-like figures from Paul Ginsparg to Stevan Harnad has been unceasing throughout that period, has won many battles, has chipped away at the edifice of scholarly communication, has moved the debate from the fringes of discourse to the mainstream, has probably won the argument, but so far has not won the war. A decade ago Joshua Lederberg, the eminent scientist and Nobel prize-winner talked of the change in technology at a UNESCO sponsored meeting and said:
'Now what are some of the foreseeable consequences? I really have nothing to ask of the print publishers or of the "for profit" electronic purveyors. Unless they are very selective - and they sometimes will be - about their value added, they will fall of their own weight as scientists become empowered to manage their own communications without the benefit of intermediaries.'
This simply has not happened in mainstream science. Although Swan's work has demonstrated the willingness of researchers to deposit articles in repositories, this has tended to be a passive rather than an active agreement, judging by the thin population of most institutional repositories. Open Access journals have also grown in numbers. In November 2005, the Directory of Open Access Journals [3] lists almost 1900 open access journals. But open access is a long way from being at the heart of scholarly communication and is ranged against large commercial forces in the STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishing area; and although optimists will feel that the tide has turned on Open Access and that moves such as the much heralded but still awaited Research Councils' mandating of deposit will tip the balance, it has to be acknowledged that the UK scientific community looks more like donkeys led by lions (to paraphrase Max Hoffmann) than the reverse. The community looks remarkably unmoved by considerations of the future of scholarly communication. And yet it is common ground between at least some publishers and some proponents of open access that the present model is disintegrating and cannot survive [4]. It can be argued that the position in the UK is skewed by the Research Assessment Exercise. If that is the case it hardly affects what is a global problem and in any case should be self-correcting in two years time when the RAE is over. In sum then Open Access has made good progress (although as the mailing lists show there remains substantial confusion between the green and gold routes, between Open Access and Open Archives), but commercial STM publishing remains in rude and profitable health. And in an expanding market of scientific communication the commercial sector also continues to grow." (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/law/)
Open Access to Journals
"Copyright monopolists naturally seek to limit access to ideas to keep their prices relatively high. No where is this phenomenon more obnoxious than in the case of scientific journals. Here research paid for by universities and government are tightly controlled by journal publishers - this despite the fact that the manuscripts are provided them for free, and the editorial services are largely free as well. At one time journals were by nature paper publications, and typesetting and printing were expensive operations. At that time, access was naturally limited by the number of paper copies, and although in recent years a small fee was charged for additional (xerox) copies, this fee was not difficult to avoid. With the advent of the internet, this system no longer makes sense, and rebellion is brewing in the scientific community." (http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/oajournals.htm)
Open Access to Economics
"In the economics community, Ted Bergstrom has taken the lead, pointing out that scientific societies charge an order of magnitude less for their good journals than the one remaining commercial publisher (Elsevier) does for its not so good journals. He has started a campaign to reduce library costs. We have two small compaigns of our own: the NajEcon initiative of entirely web-based "not a journal," and the news aggregator, Economic Theory News. Promulgation of scientific research via the web has been aided by several other operations. NetEc is a volunteer organization that aims to index and document all economic research on the web. By providing formatted information (similar to news feeds) rather than free form organization, it makes it possible to construct news aggregators such as Economic Theory News, and answer question that Google cannot such as "let me browse interesting work in theoretical economics from the last several months."
There are also three noteworthy non-free projects. JSTOR has created electronic copies of back issues of the major non-commercial journals. Unfortunately, while it once served to make research more available, and still makes back articles that appeared in the non-commercial journal more available than those that appeared in commercial journals, it has long since covered its startup cost, and now serves to obstruct rather than enhance scientific communication through its closed access model. The Social Science Research Network collects various articles in economics and other disciplines and archives them, making some available for free, and other for ridiculously high prices. Whether it server overall to make research more or less available is hard to say. Similarly the BEJournals are online journals that started in an apparent effort to widen access, but seem now to be little different than any other journal.
By far the most exciting development is that of open access journals. An open access journal makes scientific research freely available over the web. That means that anyone can access the information for free, and that the information, unprotected by passwords or other proprietary devices, can be indexed by Google and the other major search engines, so that the information is easy to find. The Public Library of Science is a broad scientific initiative to create open access journals. Within economics, sadly but not unpredictably, the major scientific societies have been slow to move to the open access model. However there are a few bright lights - bear in mind that by having a paper published in one of these journals, your paper will be more widely available than if you publish in a better known journal - and in 10 years time, not only will your paper be more widely available, but the journal may have become better known than the currently famous journals that are killing themselves through closed access." (http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/oajournals.htm)
Discussion
The benefits of open access to science
From an article by Alma Swan in the American Scientist at http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55131
We recommend you read this article in full.
"How does science measure the worth of a published piece of work? The standard metric today is the citation: Highly cited articles (and journals) have measurable impact. As open-access publishing experiments are moving forward, they are beginning to rack up numbers. By definition an open-access article has greater visibility, and it's becoming evident that scientists do take the opportunity to read and use what they would otherwise not have seen. The bar chart on the next page shows that across a range of scholarly disciplines, opening access to articles increases their citation rate. Behind the numbers are the new collaborations that result when scientists who don't know of one another's work discover synergies that can be exploited. Science needs open access to facilitate that process.
Open access can advance science in another way, by accelerating the speed at which science moves. In most fields, open access is still a rarity rather than the norm, but in some fields of physics (high-energy, condensed matter and astrophysics) it has been commonplace for more than a decade. The arXiv, an open-access archive now maintained at Cornell University, contains copies of almost every article published in these disciplines, deposited by the authors for all to use. Tim Brody of Southampton University has measured the time between when articles are deposited in arXiv and when citations to those articles begin to appear. Over the years, this interval has been shrinking as the arXiv has come into near-universal use as a repository and as physicists have taken advantage of the fact that early posting of preprints allows them immediate access to others' results. In other words, a system built on open access is shortening the research cycle in these disciplines, accelerating progress and increasing efficiency in physics.
Open access can also advance science by enabling semantic computer technologies to work more effectively on the research record. Such advanced software technologies already exist, awaiting a larger corpus because they need the full text of scientific articles to work on, not just the abstract. Semantic technologies can do two things. First, they hold out the promise of being able to integrate different types of research output—articles, databases and other digital material—to form a single, integrated information resource and to create new, meaningful and useful information from it. An early example of this sort of knowledge creation is the Neurocommons, a project of the ScienceCommons organization. Second, Web 2.0 technologies, the set of tools that aid collaborative effort (including social tagging and filtering and weblogs), can help scientists in their work by offering personalization mechanisms that enable them to tailor and enhance what information they access and share, saving time and effort.
Open access also enables a different kind of software tool to aid the management of science. Such tools search full-text articles and index the references they contain—the citations to other articles. They can thus calculate the impact of an individual article (the number of times it is cited) and do the same for its author, and for her research group, department or institution if required. They can track the evolution of ideas, topics and fields and facilitate trends analysis, enabling better prediction of which research areas are waxing and waning. The value of such tools to research managers, policymakers and funders will be enormous, enabling better funding and planning decisions to be made in the interest of scientific progress. To work, though, they need access to the full-text of research articles—an open literature.
Finally, the new ways in which science is being done are themselves requiring the culture and norms of open access. Interdisciplinary science, a rapidly growing phenomenon, needs open access because traditional methods do not provide effective ways by which scientists can reach out to those in unconnected fields. An open literature facilitates the finding and coming together of disparate scientific efforts that in a closed-access world are circumscribed by conventional definitions of topic, field or discipline and isolated from one another in discrete families of journals. The rise of e-science, where global collaborations generate data in vast quantities, demands the means for open and immediate sharing of information. And informal channels such as wikis and blogs that are used for disseminating scientific information that cannot be communicated by journals—including time-critical information—must be accompanied by access to the peer-reviewed literature if scientific information is to be accurately conveyed and interpreted.
So yes, open access can advance science and will do so more and more effectively as more scientists make their work freely available. Moreover, science will not benefit in a vacuum: New work by economist John Houghton and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Melbourne shows that enhanced access to research findings is likely to result in an enhanced return on investment in research and development, something that can benefit every economy in the world. Research is expensive enough that the world can scarcely afford an antiquated, inefficient and high-cost system of information dissemination." (http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55131)
Open Access: Why We Should Have It
"I propose four main reasons as to why Open Access is beneficial for the way scholarly research is carried out and how its findings are used, and is thus incontrovertibly beneficial for human society as a result. I mention the latter because the stakeholders are, after all, not just the immediate players in the game: we all have stakes in there, too – researchers, research institutions, nations and global society as a whole. We all have an interest in the efficient and effective progress of scholarly endeavour. The reasons I offer, then, for why Open Access is the way to go are these:
1. Open Access means there is greater visibility and accessibility, and thus impact from scholarly endeavour
2. Open access means there is more rapid and more efficient progress of scholarly research
3. Open Access means there can be better assessment, better monitoring and better management of science
4. Open Access means that novel information can be created using new computational technologies." ([1])
Stevan Harnad on the differences between open access to code, text, and data
Steven Harnad at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2968.html
"It would be a *great* conceptual and strategic mistake for the movement dedicated to open access to peer-reviewed research (BOAI) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ to conflate its sense of "free" vs. open" with the sense of "free vs. open" as it is used in the free/open-source software movements. The two senses are not at all the same, and importing the software-movements' distinction just adds to the still widespread confusion and misunderstanding that there is in the research community about toll-free access.
I will try to state it in the simplest and most direct terms possible: Software is code that you use to *do* things. It may not be enough to let you use the code for free to do things, because one of the things you may want to do is to modify the code so it will do *other* things. Hence you may need not only free use of the code, but the code itself has to be open, so you can see and modify it.
There is simply *no counterpart* to this in peer-reviewed research article use. None. Researchers, in using one another's articles, are using and re-using the *content* (what the articles are reporting), and not the *code* (i.e., the actually words in the text). Yes, they read the text. Yes (within limits) they may quote it. Yes, it is helpful to be able to navigate the code by character-string and boolean searching. But what researchers are fundamentally *not* doing in writing their own articles (which build on the articles they have read) is anything faintly analogous to modifying the code for the original article!
I hope that that is now transparent, having been pointed out and written in longhand like this. So if it is obvious that what researchers do with the articles they read is not to modify the text in order to generate a new text, as programmers may modify a program to generate a new program, then where on earth did this open/free source/access conflation come from?
And there is a second conflation inherent in it, namely, a conflation between research publishing (i.e., peer-reviewed journal articles) and public data-archiving (scientific and scholarly databases consisting of the raw and processed data on which the research reports are based).
Digital data archiving (e.g., the various genome databases, astrophysical databases, etc.) is relatively new, and it is a powerful *supplement* to peer-reviewed article publishing. In general, the data are not *in* the published article, they are *associated with* it. In paper days, there was not the page-quota or the money to publish all the data. And even in digital days, there is no standardized practice yet of making the raw data as public as the research findings themselves; but there is definite movement in that direction, because of its obvious power and utility.
The point, however, is this: As of today, articles and data are not the same thing. The 2,000,000 new articles appearing every year in the planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (the full-text literature that -- as we cannot keep reminding ourselves often enough, apparently -- the open/free access movement is dedicated to freeing from access-tolls) consists of articles only, *not* the research data on which the articles are based.
Hence, today, the access problem concerns toll-access to the full-texts of 2,000,000 articles published yearly, not access to the data on which they are based (most of which are not yet archived online, let alone published; and, when they *are* archived online, they are often already publicly accessible toll-free!).
No doubt research practices will evolve toward making all data accessible to would-be users, along with the articles reporting the research findings. This is quite natural, and in line with researchers' desire to maximize the use and hence the impact of their research. What may happen is that journals will eventually include some or all the underlying data as part of the peer-reviewed publication itself (there may even be "peer-reviewed data"), but in an online digital supplement only, rather than in the paper edition.
(What is *dead-certain*, though, is that, as this happens, authors will not be idiotic enough to sign over copyright for their research data to their publishers, the same way they have been signing over copyright for the texts of their research reports! So let's not even waste time on that implausible hypothetical contingency. The research community may be slow off the mark in reaching for the free-access that is already within its grasp in the online era, but they have not altogether taken leave of their senses!)
But that bridge (digital data supplements), if it ever comes, can be crossed if/when we get to it. Right now, when we are talking about the peer-reviewed literature to which we are trying to free access we are talking about *articles* and not about *data*. Hence, exactly as in the conflation of text with software in the invalid and misleading open/free source analogy, the conflation of open/free full-text access to the refereed literature with hypothetical questions about data-access and data re-use and re-analysis capability is likewise invalid and misleading. Article-access and data-access are different, and it is only the first that is at issue today. " (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2968.html)
A Plea for Caution
By John Enderby at http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/20/1/4/1
(John Enderby is immediate past president of the Institute of Physics and a paid adviser to its publishing arm.)
"Much is made by advocates of open-access publishing of the notion that our human rights include, in some sense, "the right to know". However, in his recent book The Access Principle (2005 MIT Press), John Willinsky from the University of British Columbia makes the crucial distinction between "open" access and "free" access. Most moral philosophers would argue that there is a hierarchy of rights with perhaps clean water, food, clothing and shelter at the top. But none of these is free.
In many societies this apparent contradiction is resolved by forcing those who can pay for food and shelter to do so, while providing welfare payments to those who cannot pay. Once it is recognized that access to reliable information and the right to know likewise have a cost, the question arises as to who should pay for the necessary validation and dissemination.
It is at this point that the disagreements arise. In its purest form, open-access publishing would offer all material in its final, edited, formatted and paginated form freely available, with the publication costs being entirely borne by the authors of papers or the people who funded their work. The traditional "subscription" model, again its purest form, makes material accessible only to those who pay for it, with authors paying nothing towards publication. Between these two extremes is a continuum of business models.
I have great difficulty with open access in its purest form. Economic models in which the producer pays – but the consumer does not – are, to say the least, unusual. At the moment, if researchers do not like a particular journal, they can choose to publish elsewhere. But if all journals were open access, consumers would not be able to exercise any influence over the market. Instead, presumably, the funding agencies would have the upper hand, having to decide how much of their resources would go to publication costs.
And here we meet another difficulty. There is no universal figure for the cost of publishing research papers because it depends strongly on the proportion of papers that are rejected. Publishing research papers is unusual in the business sense because a lot of time, energy and money goes into dealing with papers that do not meet the quality threshold of the journal in question and so do not appear as a "product". Most commentators now agree that the costs in the quality end of the market are about £1500–£2000 per published paper.
Some advocates of open access have talked about charging researchers a certain amount when they submit a paper and then making them pay an additional fee if their paper is published. However, this approach is bureaucratic and open to abuse. Imagine sending a paper and cash to a publisher and then having the paper rejected. Could you then ask your funding agency for more money so you can submit the paper again and, if so, for how long could this continue?
I am also worried about the implication for developing countries. If author charges became the norm, there may be pressure from aid agencies for scientists from these nations to publish their work in less prestigious, low-impact journals that charge less because their acceptance rates are high. At present, all authors can have their research reviewed free of charge in any journal of their choice. Open-access publishing could therefore lead to journals being dominated entirely by scientists from the richest nations.
And finally those countries with an active scientific workforce would be out of pocket in two ways. Researchers in the UK, for example, produce about 75,000 papers a year, which means they would have to pay about £100m in author fees if all journals were open access. This sum is far higher than the £90m they currently pay in library subscriptions.
Second, a lot of high-quality research in Europe is published in US-based journals. In other words, if all journals were open access, hard cash from research budgets would end up in the coffers of American publishers, although this would be partly offset by a saving on subscriptions. The loss of income from journal subscriptions overseas could also threaten learned societies like the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society.
I do, however, have some reservations about the subscription model in its purest from. As a trustee of the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, which seeks to make papers available to developing nations, I am aware of the problems of making people pay for information. Thankfully, the open-access debate has forced publishers to tackle some of the disadvantages of the subscription model.
Many publishers now give readers free access to all articles either for a limited period following publication or once a certain time has elapsed. Others are experimenting with hybrid models in which authors can choose to pay a publication charge in exchange for open access. Most publishers also now allow authors to post the accepted versions of their papers online.
My view is that market forces will lead to variety of models. However, for us all to move to open-access publishing, which is a so far unproved business model, is not in the best interests of science until experimentation has revealed some of its unintended consequences. I am therefore uneasy about governments or anyone else imposing new rules on authors as these could lead to unforeseen distortions in the market. It must be for each scientific community to decide for itself how best to organize the publication of its research." (http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/20/1/4/1)
More information
Interview with Stevan Harnad on Open Access
OA Status Reports
Trends Favoring Open Access, overview by Peter Suber, at http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/trends-favoring-open-access/
Another summary here at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-07.htm
First Quarter 2007 overview by the South Centre, from the point of view of developing countries, at http://www.southcentre.org/info/sccielipquarterly/ipdev2007q1.pdf
Resources by Peter Suber
Open Access Overview http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (Peter Suber's introduction to OA for those who are new to the concept)
Very Brief Introduction to Open Access http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm (like the above, but prints on just one page)
Open Access News blog http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html (Peter Suber's blog, updated daily)
SPARC Open Access Newsletter http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm (Peter Suber's newsletter, published monthly)
Writings on Open Access http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/oawritings.htm (Peter Suber's articles on OA)
Timeline of the open access movement http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm (Peter Suber's chronology of the landmark events)
What you can do to help the cause of open access http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/do.htm (Peter Suber's list of what individuals and institutions can do)
Declarations and Policy Papers
The Budapest Open Access Initiative aims to guarantee access to scienfitic materials, at : http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm ; the Science Commons initiative by Lawrence Lessig et al, at http://science.creativecommons.org/ ; International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, at http://www.inasp.info/
Open Access no danger for peer review. Issue Brief against the PRISM propaganda by the Association of Research Libraries]
Open Access Depositories
Open Access scientific journals are thriving; see the Directory of Open Access Journals at http://www.doaj.org/; the Directory of Open Access Repositories, http://www.opendoar.org/; the Open Archives Initiative, http://www.openarchives.org/
Open access archives: the Los Alamos e-print archive, at http://www.arxiv.org/ ; Pub Med Central life sciences archive, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov; BioMed Central, http://www.biomedcentral.com/;
The Public Library of Science aims to reorganize scientific publishing on an open model, at http://www.plos.org/; Wired discusses some of the difficulties of the project at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67797,00.html?
The academic journal literature is accessible through Charles Bailey's Open Access Bibliography, ARL, 2005, at http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/oab.htm
Literature
Blog entry on P2P and the Open Access Movement, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=14
Open access publishing: A developing country view, by Jennifer I.
Papin-Ramcharan and Richard A. Dawe
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/papin/
Strategies for developing sustainable open access scholarly journals, by
David J. Solomon http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/solomon/
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, at http://www.digital-scholarship.com/sepb/sepb.html
OAIster, at http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/OAIster
Open Access Webliography, at http://www.escholarlypub.com/cwb/oaw.htm
Open Access News Blog, by Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, by Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm
Key Books To Read
The following books were chosen from a list provided by Peter Suber.
Book 1. Open Access to Knowledge / Libre accès aux savoirs. Francis André. Futuribles, Perspectives, 72 pages, 2005
"If open-source software has shown the importance of skill sharing, it is part of a broader issue: the progress of thought, and therefore of science, depends primarily on the freedom to communicate and exchange ideas. Thus the importance of the international initiative in favour of open access to scientific works that challenges a commercial publishing system where some publishers can claim a quasi-monopoly. Francis André is a major player of this movement of utmost importance for Southern countries and ultimately for the overall global development of innovation." (comment from http://www.futuribles.com/home.html)
Book 2: John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, MIT Press, 2005.
"Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past -- from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America -- stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story -- online open access publishing by scholarly journals -- and makes a case for open access as a public good. A commitment to scholarly work, writes Willinsky, carries with it a responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible: this is the access principle. In the digital age, that responsibility includes exploring new publishing technologies and economic models to improve access to scholarly work. Wide circulation adds value to published work; it is a significant aspect of its claim to be knowledge. The right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. Open access, argues Willinsky, can benefit both a researcher-author working at the best-equipped lab at a leading research university and a teacher struggling to find resources in an impoverished high school. Willinsky describes different types of access -- the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, grants open access to issues six months after initial publication, and First Monday forgoes a print edition and makes its contents immediately accessible at no cost. He discusses the contradictions of copyright law, the reading of research, and the economic viability of open access. He also considers broader themes of public access to knowledge, human rights issues, lessons from publishing history, and "epistemological vanities." The debate over open access, writes Willinsky, raises crucial questions about the place of scholarly work in a larger world -- and about the future of knowledge."
John Willinsky is Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Empire of Words: The Reign of the OEDand a developer of Open Journals Systems software.