Here’s John Willinsky’s conclusion in a recent First Monday essay:
Open access to research and scholarship would foster a global exchange of public goods. It would extend and sustain an open, alternative economy for intellectual properties. It would strengthen the links between open source software – which is vital to providing open access to research – and the university’ls long– standing tradition of open science. Given the encroachments, not to mention the temptations, of the knowledge business, this is no time to take the commonwealth of learning for granted. It falls to the members of that commonwealth to recognize and support the current convergence of open initiatives that represent dedicated efforts to ensure the future of that learning.
This month, employees and students at the University of Oslo will elect a new chancellor. It is regarded as an important election, with five different candidates. Norwegian universities are experiencing a period of reform and rapid change. Many are concerned about academic freedom, and complain about commercialization. So you would expect at least one candidate to embrace ideas such as those Willinsky presents in that essay? You would be wrong. Not one of the five candidates even mentions the words open access or scientific publishing in their manifests (available in Norwegian).
You are surprised? You shouldn’t be. University people often prefer to be invisible and unlinked. They will defend “academic freedom”, but not by making their texts available to the public (who essentially is their employer, as these universities are state funded). So they become The Block Access Movement [I also think some of them are confusing open access to scientific articles with the general book market, which is something else altogether. The Open Access movement isn’t about killing off book publishing]. There was an interesting example of this when Lawrence Lessig visited Oslo in June. Check Lessig’s shocked remarks afterwards:
[A] professor (…) was celebrating the system where he was compensated every time someone copied one of his articles. I had criticized this. That criticism led to my being called “naive.” I said that while I had no problem at all with people paying to listen to music, or novels, we had to be extremely sensitive to the way price might block the spread of knowledge. And that for academic and scientific work, the best model for producing and spreading knowledge might not be one that meters each use. Professors should be paid. But let that be their compensation, and let the knowledge they produce spread widely. Yet there was a general view at the conference that this was wrong. That we hurt developing nations, for example, if we give them knowledge for free.
Last point: There are institutional open archives both at the University of Oslo and Bergen now. Most of the material you’ll find there are master theses and doctoral dissertations – because they now force students to publish there. I fear the professors will have to be forced, too. Unless they discover what the rest of the world is starting to find out: That publishing in open access journals gives greater research impact (link via jill/txt).
