Last week, John Udell wrote about open source education in his InfoWorld column. This week he asks "whether academia itself continues to uphold the tradition from which open source draws its inspiration." Excerpt:
Consider John Abramson's indictment of our system of medical research. He alleges that as the sources of funding have shifted from government to private enterprise, access to primary data is increasingly restricted:
Drug companies often keep the results of their studies secret, even from their own researchers [my emphasis], on the grounds that such results are "proprietary information" of economic value.
Open access has prevailed since 1991 in those fields served by the LANL archive: physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology. And there is a thriving open access movement that aims to leverage the economics of web publishing to freely distribute many other kinds of research. The NIH policy on public access to NIH-funded research gives that initiative a major boost.
But if academic research fully exploited the power of the web, there would be no need for an open access movement. And even if that movement were to succeed in opening up all taxpayer-funded work, we’d be left without access to the large and growing share of privatized research. If you believe that the open source dynamic is critical to the advancement of knowledge, and I do, there are a couple of ways we might proceed. Governnment could, once again, play a more dominant role in funding research. Or private enterprise could decide that open access -- to basic research, at least -- works to its benefit.
Of the two approaches, I think I’d favor the latter. Especially if government’s role were to reward business -- e.g., with tax breaks -- for contributing basic research to the commons.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/12/2006 02:03:00 PM.
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.
