...[T]he keynote speaker today is John Willinsky from the Public Knowledge Project. He begins by noting issues of civic participation and access to knowledge as a key question of today, and relates these especially also to academic publishing: 'you make all the content, they take all the wealth' also applies in this environment, and the moral economy of academic work must be carefully considered....[W]e, too, should aim to make our work more public, and connect it to wider civic concerns. This goes well beyond questions of technologies of access and distribution - it requires a shift of thinking; we need to 'get in the game'....
John speaks here specifically also to the future development of AoIR, and suggests that we may want to consider developing an open access journal for the Association....
The Canadian government is now explicitly supporting open access journals, in fact, and offers funding support for such journals. What's emerged here is a kind of gift economy, and an economy which trades in status rather than currency.
The DOAJ, and the Open Journal System which John has been instrumental in developing, are tools developed explicitly to support such change; there are now over 1000 journals in the world using OJS as their publishing system....
Even commercial publishers are slowly coming to the game - Taylor & Francis's Information, Communication, and Society (which is now forming an association with AoIR) has introduced an open access clause, for example, allowing authors to post pre-print or post-print versions of articles on their own Websites, if under some very stifling conditions.
So, as scholars we could make a great deal of this work freely available for our peers now, under these conditions, and John passionately argues that we do. There are two roads to open access....
Such open access publishing increases visibility and readership; it demonstrably increases citation levels (and as a result may increase financial returns to scholars where citation levels are linked to funding or promotion outcomes); it improves status and impact in the field. In developing nations, in particular, open access journals are incredibly important, as they both improve local scholars' access to information, and local scholars' ability to publish their own work to a wider audience. John notes the role of open access journals, and particularly of the PubMed site, in alternative medicine scholarship as another example - where practitioners are especially frustrated with the limited level of access to scholarly information....
[W]e can and should point [from Wikipedia] to further information available in open access content repositories. Doing so would further boost civic participation and participatory culture, as it would help to connect scholarly work and wider public interests; it would transfer scholarly ideas from within the academic domain into a wider public discourse. We have the legal right and the moral sensibility to make these connections - so we ought to do it. (Indeed, John suggests that we must especially also create an expectation in our students that such open access is required.)
Finally, there is also a question of academic freedom here, as some journals (especially in medical and other expensive fields) are closely associated with large government and corporate interests; open access journals are able to operate more cheaply, with less dependence on large funders, and therefore with greater freedom from interference....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/21/2007 12:28:00 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.
