Open Access News

[In] scholarly publishing...advocates of free (as in both beer and freedom) online access to research papers are still fighting the battles that open source won years ago. At stake is nothing less than control of academia's treasure-house of knowledge. The parallels between this movement - what has come to be known as “open access” – and open source are striking. For both, the ultimate wellspring is the Internet, and the new economics of sharing that it enabled. Just as the early code for the Internet was a kind of proto-open source, so the early documentation – the RFCs – offered an example of proto-open access. And for both their practitioners, it is recognition – not recompense – that drives them to participate.

Like all great movements, open access has its visionary – the RMS figure - who constantly evangelizes the core ideas and ideals. In 1976, the Hungarian-born cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad founded a scholarly print journal that offered what he called “open peer commentary,” using an approach remarkably close to the open source development process....Harnad has long had an ambitious vision of a new kind of scholarly sharing (rather as RMS does with code): one of his early papers is entitled “Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge”, while a later one is called bluntly: “A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing.” Meanwhile, the aims of the person who could be considered open access's Linus to Harnad's RMS, Paul Ginsparg, a professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell University, were more modest. At the beginning of the 1990s, Ginsparg wanted a quick and dirty solution to the problem of putting high-energy physics preprints (early versions of papers) online. As it turns out, he set up what became the arXiv.org preprint repository on 16 August, 1991 – nine days before Linus made his fateful “I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones” posting. ...Beyond self-archiving - later termed “green” open access by Harnad – lies publishing in fully open online journals (“gold” open access). The first open access magazine publisher, BioMed Central – a kind of Red Hat of the field – appeared in 1999. In 2001 the Public Library of Science (PLoS) was launched; PLoS is a major publishing initiative inspired by the examples of arXiv.org, the public genomics databases and open source software, and which was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (to the tune of $9 million over five years). Just as free software gained the alternative name “open source” at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed “open access” as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).

Comment. There's more, but read the whole thing. We all know large and small parallels between the two movements, not to mention actual overlap, but Moody is remarkably specific about matching up counterparts. A thumbnail of his map:

• Harnad → Stallman
• Ginsparg → Torvalds
• Suber → Raymond
• BOAI → Freeware Summit
• Soros → O'Reilly
• BioMed Central → Red Hat
• Elsevier → Microsoft

Update. Also see Glyn's blog posting to follow-up the article.