Open Access: Closed Discourse or Open Knowledge?
Even though Open Access is one of the most common Open Initiatives, it is still quite unconnected to other Open Initiatives as Open Data or Open Government. Although the same arguments are used to underpin demands for Open Access and most of the other Open Initiatives (e.g. efficiency, transparency, innovation), many differences have to be considered when we compare these initiatives and Open Access. Unlike Open Knowledge Open Access was not over a longer period dominated by grass root initiatives, soon stakeholder from the information management sector tried to take the lead within the Open Access movement. These institutions had great experiences in big infrastructure projects, but little in small & smart solutions – why Open Access often suffers from a big discrepancy between sophisticated technical services and a comparably low acceptance. Furthermore (especially in the beginning) Open Access had to face broadside by the publishing industry that considered Open Access a threat to its business models. Additionally within the field of scientific publishing there are very intense social effects working: Scientific capital will decide if your scientific career will prosper or fail. This capital is accumulated by publications in journals with a high impact, but since these are mostly not Open Access Journals scientists tend to prefer to give away all their copyrights to journal publisher instead of publishing their articles in an Open Access journal or an Open Access repository. Nevertheless they esteem Open Access documents as an important source of information. In short: Open Access is coined by a dominance of infrastructure, economic discussions, legal aspects and social dependencies. This contribution tries to discuss and clarify the relationship between the paradigms of Open Access and Open Knowledge.
by Ulrich Herb on July 1st at 18:00 in Track II
Ulrich Herb studied sociology at Saarland University (Germany). He is active in the Open Access area since 2001 when he started to work as an Open Access the delegate of Saarland University and State Library. Additionally he holds a lectureship in Information Science at the University for Applied Science in Chur (Switzerland) and he works as a scientific publication consultant and science journalist.
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