Open Access across the Disciplines

I’m currently organizing a series of events at my university for Open Access Week (Oct 22-28), so my head is full of open access right now. It is my sense that there isn’t a very high level of awareness about open access or the many related issues in scholarly publishing at my institution, so I’m creating a workshop for faculty that will be, I hope, both informative and persuasive.

Luckily, fellow Bookaneer Althea, alerted me to a piece by Marisa Ramírez in the most recent issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Ramírez relates a true story about a doctor who wanted to distribute to other doctors an emergency room checklist developed by researchers at another institution, but because the original authors had signed away their copyrights when publishing the checklist it took months and many emails and phone calls to receive permission to distribute it. The doctor, when he finally received permission, was glad, but wondered how many lives could’ve been saved if he had been able to distribute the checklist sooner.

It is a great and obviously compelling story about the real-life impact of “locked” content, and the potential value of open access. How can you argue with this? Open access saves lives! However, these stories always leave me feeling bad for the other disciplines. The impact of open access is not always (actually, rarely) about life and death. In most cases, the effects of access to scholarship are less immediate, but I believe still essential and life-changing (if not always life-saving).

The promise of open access is the same as the promise of education. Research and scholarship are transformative because they expose us to new ideas and change the way we think about the world. I still remember certain transformative readings when I was in college: reading Tocqueville and Rousseau changed the way I thought about citizenship and democracy; Amartya Sen haunted my study of Political Science; and two radical feminists bookended my undergraduate career, first an essay by Andrea Dworkin and finally a commencement address by Angela Davis. These are just a few scholars, critics, and theorists that have transformed or impacted the way I see the world, how I interact with it, and really, who I am today. Now I have no idea how I accessed these readers, through books or articles, in print or online. But, does it matter? The point is, access to scholarship is transformative. Knowledge shared and circulated is powerful. Knowledge kept under lock and key isn’t knowledge, it is a secret. This is what open access is about, it is about sharing ideas freely and the belief that more thought, more information, more knowledge make the world better.

I bring this up, because while open access is much more prevalent and less controversial in the sciences, there are still many misunderstandings and reservations in other disciplines. Earlier this week, the American Historical Association issued a statement acknowledging the inequities of the current scholarly publishing system, but also expressing concern over their perceptions of the open access model. Others have addressed the AHA’s statement (here, and here), but it points to a real need for open access advocates to address the value of OA in the social sciences and the humanities as well in the sciences.

As I write this I am very aware of the many elements of and obstacles to changing the systems of scholarly publishing. The AHA is concerned chiefly about the mechanics of open access publishing, and less about the potential value. I have further thoughts about the diffusion of publishing in the open access model, and the return of publishing to the purview of universities and scholarly societies, but these are for a different blog post. For now, I would like to reiterate that sharing scholarship freely and widely can have a profound and lasting impact on our society, be it in the sciences or other fields. I second Ramírez’s call:

As the 6th annual Open Access Week approaches, think about how you can tell your story so others understand “why OA?”.

I personally am thinking of stories in library science, in women’s studies, in history, in political science, and in the many fields where knowledge and scholarship have transformed my life.