Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, March 27, 2009

More on how OA differs from FOSS and other kin

Stevan Harnad, On the affinities and disaffinities among free software, peer-to-peer access, and open access to peer-reviewed research, a QuickTime movie of a presentation at Free Software and Beyond: The World of Peer Production (Manchester, March 26, 2009).  From his summary:

Free/Open Software...has been central to the growth of the Open Access Movement.

However, there are also crucial distinctions that need to be made and understood, among the movements for (1) Free/Open source software, (2) Open Access (to peer-reviewed research), (3) P2P file-sharing, (4) Open Data, (5) Creative Commons licensing, and (5) Wikipedia-style collective writing. Open Access (OA) is focussed primarily on refereed research articles.

The crucial distinctions revolve mostly around (a) the fundamental difference between author giveaway vs. non-giveawaywork and (b) the functional differences between the re-use/re-mix/re-publication needs for peer-reviewed research article texts on the one hand, and data, software and other kinds of digital content on the other.