The public intellectual, to my mind, is one who not only engages in civic life, but is motivated by a sense of responsibility and a shared humanity to “be of service.” This is guided by a simple statement: Be the change you want to see in the world....There are at least four strategies being useful, for making change:
1. Public dissemination of research/ideas: The case of Open access
2. Civic engagement: Walking the walk
3. Subversive Teaching
3. Norms-based research...
Public dissemination of research: The case of Open Access
The public intellectual free shares her intellect, research, thoughts and ideas, with the broader community - through public lectures, media interviews, and popular and academic articles
This strategy counteracts monopolies of knowledge, which Innis identifies as biased idea structures that control and legitimate – or authenticate – knowledge. They further promulgate and reinforce power imbalances within society while at the same time concealing such imbalances
According to Innis, knowledge monopolies develop in conjunction with closed communications....
The academy is perhaps one of the main producers of monopolies of knowledge, aside from industry and privatized science. The academic journal publishing system – as one example - is heavily reliant on copyright and expensive subscriptions, which effectively restrict this knowledge to the rarified environs of the ivory tower....
Open knowledge production is a self-conscious practice that has historical and theoretical roots in the technical development of the computer and computer networking....
The Creative Commons initiative is one major outcome of the FSM, moving the copyright debate to another level. Declaring only “some rights reserved”, Creative Commons uses private rights to make public goods....
The idea of open knowledge production has now moved beyond software, into cultural production, and also into academia, with initiatives like open access journals, open genetics, open geodata and open content....
These publishers rely on the free labour of academics – in terms of writing, editing and reviewing – yet claim the copyright for all articles and continue to increase subscription fees beyond the rate of inflation. This makes their journals unaffordable to many universities, whose libraries have been forced to cancel subscriptions, reducing the number of titles they carry....
The open access movement, which supports free and open access to all scholarly research online, has contested the old (print-based) publishing model, demonstrating that knowledge is a non-depletable resource – a public good, and not a commodity....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/25/2008 10:28:00 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.
