Michael Schiltz, Gert Verschraegen, and Stefano Magnolo, Open Access to Knowledge in World Society?Soziale Systeme, 11 (2005) H2. I'm linking to a self-archived version. Despite the official date on the journal, the issue will appear later this month.
Abstract: This paper examines the societal significance of the Open Access movement and especially addresses its role in the public domain and in what’s commonly called ‘global civil society’. Taking advantage of the opportunity to study the emergence of a potentially transformative communicative technology in situ, we explore the social and evolutionary potential of Open Access, demonstrating how the global spread of technologies and associated semantics of ‘openness’ are giving new content to the concepts of the public sphere, civil society and social inclusion. In a first step, the paper argues that classical concept of civil society is less and less convincing and not adapted to the features of modern world society. In a second step the paper proposes different ways to rethink the notions of ‘civil society’ and the ‘public’ to fit the reality of a world society where knowledge is increasingly a resource for creating associations and networks. We argue that the Open Access and Creative Commons movement have contributed to the proliferation of non-localised, global ‘epistemic communities’ and have created new definitions of information and ownership. The paper also tackles misunderstandings of Open Access as a radical denial of copyright or revenue (and even profit), but demonstrates how Open Access is very well compatible with current economic realities and the emerging structure of world society.
Update (8/24/06). The published edition of this article is now OA at the journal site.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/04/2006 02:53:00 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.
