Athena Unbound
“Offers an admirably pragmatic yet principled approach to the perennial problem of encouraging both the production and distribution of knowledge.”
—Paul Romer, Nobel Laureate and University Professor, NYU
“Baldwin weaves, with wit and eloquence, a compelling case for making this right an online reality.”
—John Willinsky, author of Copyright’s Broken Promise
An excerpt from Athena Unbound by Peter Baldwin: a clear-eyed examination of the open access (OA) movement—past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities.
Torrents have been written about open access, but little comes from those who supply or consume knowledge: the scholars who produce the works that are to be accessible and their potential readers, whether colleagues or the general public. Instead, the drum is beaten by librarians, information- and data-science scholars, media professors, and others who populate a kind of second-order stratum of academia, scholars of scholarship.
A vast quantity of work has billowed forth, professionalizing the field by making it a full-time job just to keep up. Countless conferences, workshops, networks, study groups, Twitter feeds, journals, and blogs keep up a tireless outpouring. The caravan moves on, but where is it going? Founding and running open-access journals and publishers, organizing boycotts of the worst-offending academic presses, lobbying politicians to reform copyright laws, probing the boundaries of what counts as legal under current rules: such activities move us toward a freer exchange of information. What the theorizing and discussion contribute is less obvious. As so often in the academic world, noble intent does not necessarily produce tangible results. Process is often confused with progress.
Why, then, add another brick to the edifice? Because many participants come from a nimbus formed around the scholarly enterprise without being part of it, they often pay little attention to workaday academics’ concerns. Especially in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, the professoriate is surprisingly ignorant of—and, if aware, often hostile to—open access. Because the well-funded sciences have been the first to warm to the cause, open access has been tailored to their specifications, with publishing fees paid out of generous research budgets. Including less well-endowed fields remains a hurdle.
Athena Unbound seeks to flesh out debates that often remain focused on the sciences. It situates current discussions in a long history of information’s progress toward greater openness. Despite the mantra that “information wants to be free,” much does not. Corporate R&D makes up the majority of research and is not striving for release. Most writers of fiction and commercially viable nonfiction sell their wares in the marketplace, hope to live from the proceeds, and have no interest in opening up. That holds for most producers of visual and aural content, too.
Nor are privacy and open access harmonious bunkmates. We naturally resist freeing up information about ourselves except as we choose.
The problem of too much information is a leitmotif.
Even without copyright reform or open access, as the public domain inevitably expands, freely available content will eventually dwarf what any current cohort of creators issues. What effect will this have on future cultural producers’ motivations to bring forth novel work? What does the common complaint that we disgorge too much information mean? Can more information ever be a bad thing, even if some is mediocre?