Open Access News

As you may have noticed, there's a bit of a virtual shindig going on in celebration of GNU's 25th birthday (including Stephen Fry's wonderfully British salute, which really, er, takes the cake....).

Most of these encomiums have dutifully noted how all the free and open source software we take for granted today – GNU/Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the rest – would simply not exist had Richard Stallman not drawn his line in the digital sand. But I think all of these paeans rather miss the point, which is that GNU represents the start of not just free software, but also many, many other movements, all based around the idea of sharing and collaboration. ...

One of the first and most obvious applications of this approach outside software was to content, specifically Wikipedia. It is no accident that Wikipedia uses the GNU Free Documentation Licence, since there was a conscious borrowing of many of free software's ideas to the collaborative creation of freely-available content ...

Ironically, science itself has moved away from these ideas of sharing in one particular regard. Until recently, the vast majority of scientific (and academic) papers were published in for-profit journals. To read the latest research – and hence build on it – scientists (or generally their institutions) had to take out often costly subscriptions. ...

This unfair and cumbrous system was hardly conducive to rapid exchange of ideas, and some began to wonder whether there weren't better ways – something along the lines of the free software approach, for example. One of those wondering was Paul Ginsparg.

At the beginning of the 1990s, he was looking for a solution to the problem of putting high-energy physics preprints (early versions of papers) online. As a result, he set up what became the arXiv.org preprint repository on 16 August, 1991 – nine days before Linus made his famous [announcement of the Linux operating system] posting. ...

Another important figure in this area is Stevan Harnard – an RMS-like figure who has provided much of the theoretical underpinnings of this whole area, and whose writings are well worth reading. ...

Since then, open access has been fighting an uphill battle against major academic publishers, which occupy a similar position to Microsoft – and often resort to similar tactics in their efforts to block this upstart's rise. ...

For a major research institution, the cumulative cost adds up to millions of pounds a year in subscriptions. This annual tax is very like the licensing fees in the proprietary software world. What an institution saves by refusing to pay these exorbitant subscriptions it can use to fund page charges, just as companies can use monies saved on software licensing costs to pay for the support and customization they need. ...

Alongside this deepening of open access, scientists have started to think about how other aspects of their research work could be opened up in a similar way. ...

The important thing to to note is that, despite the presence of the word “open” in their names, [the open access, open data, and open science movements] are all the spiritual descendants of free software. For all the amazing riches of GNU itself ... and, more generally, of free software and open source, it is this ever-widening range of new projects based around sharing and collaboration that is the real reason to celebrate these first, incredible 25 years of Richard Stallman's epoch-making project.