The telescope was not the instrument through which Galileo opened the skies four centuries ago, forever changing our concepts of worlds terrestrial and celestial. No, Galileo's breakthrough was not a technological one, nor an intellectual one per se. Copernicus and Kepler had laid out the concepts before Galileo pointed his modest tube into the sky. ... No, it was Galileo's strategy for freely and publicly communicating his findings. Galileo opened the heavens with Open Access. ...
Of course Galileo didn't call his campaign for spreading scientific knowledge "Open Access publishing," but Galileo was following the same principles that animate today's movement to liberate scholarly knowledge. Most in his day were operating within a different paradigm--one that privileged the restriction of knowledge. ...
Take, for example, the actual inventors of the telescope, Hans Lippershey and James Metius of Alkmaar. ... They each tried to secure patents on their devices in the Netherlands. Political and legal entanglements prevented them. When Metius didn't obtain the patent, he not only refused to let anyone see his telescope again, but when he died he had all of his tools destroyed so that no one else could ever receive credit for his achievement. (It's not unlike those publishers who keep their backlist out of print because if they can't get a financial profit by selling access, then by dang, no one is going to get any other kind of profit from those books, either!)
Galileo was operating from a different set of principles than these Dutch inventors. Instead of keeping his telescope or his discoveries secret, he did everything he could to give that knowledge away. He was constantly doing public demonstrations, touring with his instrument and getting church men, academics, and laymen peeping through his optics as he explained the significance of this new mode of seeing. And he didn't charge admission or lecture fees. ...
[W]hen he published his more influential work on the Copernican theory a few years later, he did not address this important book to learned peers, nor did he compose it in Latin; he put his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems into an accessible dramatic format and published this in Italian. He ignored the academic audience and took his work to the people. ...
The digital world is no new world at all so long as it remains tethered by the same restricted knowledge paradigm that tried to ground Galileo's vision. If our communication is not electronic, online, and freed from commercial and licensing restrictions, then we are not the equals of Galileo, nor worthy of the fantastic instruments multiplying in our hands. To discourage or delay Open Access publishing today is not simply ignoring an efficiency for disseminating scholarship; it is betraying an epistemological evolution. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 5/22/2009 02:50:00 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.
