Open Access, Participation Literacy, May 19, 2006. An unsigned blog post. Excerpt:
It is self-evident that all information cannot be free....[But] there are some forms of information...[that can be free] - academic information. With academic information and knowledge, I mean information and knowledge produced in research by government financed resources. To this category I count most information and knowledge produced by universities and other forms of higher education institutions. I do not count information and knowledge produced by private companies. The form of information and knowledge produced by companies such as Microsoft and Sony belongs to another discussion....
Many universities have built their own publishing environments. The reason is not only because they want the information to be free. It is because they have realised that the business model in the academic publishing industry is out of date. A university produces large amounts of high quality information and knowledge and much of that information and knowledge is collected by publishing companies, printed on paper and/or locked in expensive digital suites and sold back to the university in the form of very expensive Journals and database subscriptions. The only reason this business model still works is because the academic norm is very conservative. The model is strongly linked to academic quality and ranking system. I do not think most researchers are so conservative though; the conservation mechanism mostly lies with the research funding and career system in the academic society....
The first point to make for a research 2.0 concept would be to free the academic information and knowledge from commercial slavery - if you publish an article in a journal, or likewise, always keep the right of reasonable usage, like a creative common license. In a connected research environment, we cannot make valuable information invisible.
I suggest a research 2.0 concept to include: [1] Open access to information created by public authorities (Universities and the like), [2] Open Peer Review, [3] Collective Intelligence in research environments, [4] The Web as platform (paper journals is not of much use in the Web 2.0 era, only e-information can be true objects to collective intelligence).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/19/2006 11:08:00 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.
