Yesterday, South Dakota banned abortion. Normally, we'd steer clear of a hot-button topic like abortion, but this law has also triggered a small firestorm around the blog of a woman named Molly, who last week put issues of open access to scientific knowledge in sharp relief by publishing a guide to setting up a cheap, safe, mobile abortion clinic for use in places where abortion has been criminalized....Like other principles of free expression, open access to scientific knowledge often seems absurdly removed from our lives. Molly shows just how tangible such knowledge can be. Science is, above all else, a moral commitment to openly and freely discussing the actual functioning of the universe (and of our bodies). People went to the stake to make science a going concern. Not all that long ago, the information Molly is sharing would have made her a criminal in many countries, just as sharing information on contraception, or evolution, or the fact that the Earth moves around the Sun all once made scientists criminals. What knowledge now being acquired will politicians take it on themselves to criminalize in the future?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/08/2006 09:43:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
