Open Access News

This paper takes measure of an emerging scholarly field that sits at the intersection of many important areas of study. Critical Information Studies (CIS) considers the ways in which culture and information are regulated by their relationship to commerce, creativity, and other human affairs. CIS captures the variety of approaches and bodies of knowledge needed to make sense of important phenomena such as copyright policy, electronic voting, encryption, the state of libraries, the preservation of ancient cultural traditions, and markets for cultural production. It necessarily stretches to a wide array of scholarly subjects, employs multiple complementary methodologies, and influences conversations far beyond the gates of the university. Economists, sociologists, linguists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, communication scholars, lawyers, computer scientists, philosophers, and librarians have all contributed to this field, and thus it can serve as a model for how engaged, relevant scholarship might be carried out. CIS interrogates the structures, functions, habits, norms, and practices that guide global flows of information and cultural elements. Instead of being concerned merely with one's right to speak (or sing or publish), CIS asks questions about access, costs, and chilling effects on, within, and among audiences, citizens, emerging cultural creators, indigenous cultural groups, teachers, and students. Central to these issues is the idea of ‘semiotic democracy’, or the ability of citizens to employ the signs and symbols ubiquitous in their environments in manners that they determine....

[C]ontroversies over copyright, technology, corporate control over information, and access to knowledge easily flow across newspaper pages, generating widespread curiosity about these issues. As a result, even the most high-level, advanced work within CIS can find its way into surprising and exciting places....[M]any CIS scholars have reached beyond spheres of scholarly discourse to influence both general public perceptions and specific policy matters. Public interest organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Creative Commons employ CIS scholarship when pursuing their agendas in courts, legislatures, international governing bodies, and the public sphere....By all indications, CIS has succeeded in changing the terms of the conversation about issues such as copyright, cultural policy, and the relationships among democracy, culture, and technology. More practically, CIS has helped generate the ‘open content’ and ‘open journals’ movement, which allows authors and artists to retain more control over the ways that publishers exploit their work and enables authors to ‘lock content open’. CIS not only has made its arguments, it has lived its arguments....Beyond the text of the scholarship, the commitment to positive liberty comes through most clearly in the projects and experiments that facilitate access to and use of scholarship and information: chiefly the development and proliferation of open access journals, open courseware, open curricula, and open archives....

Too often, academic leaders forget their ethical duty to the community of scholars and world citizens at large. They rabidly protect their ‘intellectual property’ to the detriment of the scholarly world (and the species) as a whole, and as such many suffer from what I call the ‘Content Provider Paradox’ (Vaidhyanathan 2002a). In addition, scholars themselves often overreact to perceived ‘threats’ that someone is teaching ‘their’ course or relying too heavily on ‘their’ data. This is an unhealthy and anti-intellectual disposition magnified by the general tenor of the times. Foolishly, however, scholars continue to sign away all their rights to their scholarly work to commercial publishers, who then sell their work back to their libraries at great cost. Recognizing this absurdity, some scholars have insisted on publishing their work with Creative Commons licenses, ensuring that the general public and not just patrons of expensive research libraries may read, quote, and improve on their work. And the Open Journals movement, led by the Public Library of Science and the Science Commons, also promises to let scholars contribute to the greater good while ensuring effective peer review and distribution of work (Harnad 2004). Still, many tenure committees outside of the sciences have yet to learn that open journals are better and that the commercial journal publishing process as it now stands is unethical. Indeed, it will take many years to wake scholars from the false consciousness of the academic-publishing industrial complex. Meanwhile, every scholar committed to CIS should insist on retaining some of her or his rights to publications and making them available as widely and cheaply as possible. Demanding that a publisher allow the use of a Creative Commons license is a start. If a few senior scholars withhold publication from unethical journals, then the publishing world will have to negotiate and concede that Creative Commons offers no threat to their business but greater opportunity to attract consumers. And if they do not, then scholars should found their own open journals through scholarly associations and sever ties with commercial publishers. In this way, CIS scholars can change more than the conversation about culture, control, commerce, and copyright. They can affect the workings of an industry in flux and better serve their mission to educate and illuminate the remarkable times in which we live.