Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, April 27, 2008

Access over control

John Wilbanks, The Control Fallacy:  Why OA Out-Innovates the Alternative, Nature Precedings, a preprint deposited April 25, 2008. 

Abstract:   This article examines the relationship between Open Access to the scholarly literature and innovation. It traces the ideas of “end to end” network principles in the Internet and the World Wide Web and applies them to the scholarly biomedical literature. And the article argues for the importance of relieving not just price barriers but permission barriers.

From the body of the paper:

...OA’s wellspring is the idea that innovation in education and science is best served by access to information. That’s often buried in the debate over prices and profits, business models and legislation.  In the end, OA isn’t even about money. It’s about innovation. It’s always been about innovation....

Just to be clear, here’s what I mean by a knowledge web: it’s when today’s web has enough power to work as well for science as it currently works for culture...

A knowledge web is predicated on access, and not control, of knowledge....

The most obvious layer of control is the use of copyrights to control the articles themselves. The articles are creative expressions by the authors, transferred to the publishers – that part is easy to understand. But those copyrights on expressions are being used to control and limit the impact of the ideas that are contained in the articles. This is an inversion of the original conception of copyright – it was never supposed to restrict the movement of ideas, and certainly not to restrict the movement of scientific facts like the one cited above....

[P]ublishers are happy to rent access to the knowledge heritage. Rent is the key word here, though. When the scientific publishing industry went online, they stopped selling journals to people and started renting them....

This control culture is not the result of bad people making evil decisions. It’s simply an antique system. It made sense when it started, and it actually made sense until the Internet came along and changed everything. But the control culture is a powerful drag on innovation when you’re in a networked reality....

Nature makes papers describing the full genome sequence of an organism available under a Creative Commons license....That’s empowering the user. And it’s smart. It dramatically increases the odds that a scientist comes along and innovates on the content. It doesn’t limit the universe of innovators through a series of controls and contracts and invoices.

This is in the end the fallacy of knowledge control. The power of the closed system is rooted in coherence, consistency, quality control – things that are vital and important in the right context. But these are powers that frequently fail to scale when you’re dealing with a problem of great complexity....

So what can you do? You can start by exercising your rights – even with the present culture of control, many journal publishers permit self archiving of the author's final manuscript, and many authors fail to act on this right. The first is to exercise this right and to contribute to the knowledge web right now. Second, there’s a good chance you are members of scholarly societies. Your societies should be the leading the charge towards the knowledge web – are they? It’s worth asking that question.

And last,...[w]e each have the choice, each time we publish, as to how our own individual actions make up the global activity of scientific communication. The environmental movement can teach us – our individual, local actions can actually bring about larger changes in the social perceptions and actions of our cultures. It’s time that we begin our own movement of scientific environmentalism: it’s about choosing access and rejecting the control fallacy.