Nearly a decade ago, in an insightful and valuable work, MIT professor Janet H. Murray discussed her vision for the future of the newly burgeoning World Wide Web. She wrote of “a single comprehensive global library of paintings, films, books, newspapers, television programs, and databases, a library that would be accessible from any point on the globe. It is as if the modern version of the great library of Alexandria, which contained all the knowledge of the ancient world, is about to rematerialize in the infinite expanses of cyberspace.”...[S]ince Murray’s book a number of voices have been raised decrying the barriers to the utopian vision represented by the economics of the publishing world and such “market forces.”
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig complain of “the balkanization of the web into privately owned digital storehouses,” and the fact that “the most important commercial purveyors of the past are…global multibillion-dollar information conglomerates like ProQuest, Reed Elsevier, and the Thomson Corporation, which charge libraries high prices for the vast digital databases of journals, magazines, newspapers, books, and historical documents that they control.” Indeed, Cohen and Rosenzweig have challenged the economics of traditional publishing by concurrently releasing the text of their digital history guide in a freely accessible and readably formatted web version, as well as in the traditional paper form for sale published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In their words, “Academics and enthusiasts created the web; we should not quickly or quietly cede it to giant corporations and their pricy, gated materials. The most important weapon for building the digital future we want is to take an active hand in creating digital history in the present.”...
Perhaps the representation of digital publishing as a binary opposition between “multibillion-dollar information conglomerates” and “academics and enthusiasts” does not exhaust the possibilities. Alas, those of us in the humanities who look to the government for succor are likely to be jilted. Greg Crane, a professor of classics at Tufts University, points out the ambiguous position of the humanities when it comes to government sources of funding for academic technology. He writes, “The biggest government funders of academic technology are the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation whose aggregate funding ($20 billion and $5 billion respectively) exceeds that of the National Endowment for the Humanities ($135 million requested for 2003) by a factor of 185.”...
PS: For more on the differences between government funding for the sciences and government funding for the humanities, and how it affects OA, see my January 2004 article, Promoting Open Access in the Humanities.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/12/2006 10:58:00 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.
