Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All

Description

A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities. Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance. In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for “free” knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity’s age-old ambitions. Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world. Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement. Contents Introduction Where We Are Going 1: Some Knowledge Wants to Be Free Knowledge’s Inexorable Spread The Networked Ape Information Wants to be Free? Social Justice Some Distinctions 2: The Variety of Authors and Their Content Public-Domain Infinitude Grey Literature Romantic Copyright The Rise of Collaboration Neo-Patronage The Salaried Creator 3: The Open-Access Problem One Size Does Not Fit All Publishing as a Profit Center Varieties of Open Access The Version of Record 4: Information on Wings: The History of Open Access The Causes of Open Access Eviscerating the Libraries The Serials Crisis Open Access Takes Off The Publishers Capture Open Access Financing beyond Gold Resistance Latin American Success 5: The Professoriate and Open Access Dreaming of Reward More Than Reading The Perils of Prestige Peer Review Metrics Faux Open Access 6: The Digital Disseminators Bookstores Libraries Publishers 7: Alexandria in the Cloud: Promises and Pitfalls of Global Access Transubstantiating the Libraries The Cost of Levitation Copyright and Property Publishing Open Access Publishers and Open Access Data and Content 8: An Intellectual Aquifer: The Bulletin Board Goes Global What Value Do Publishers Add? Cosmic Postings Mega-Journals 9: Finding What We Need: Searching and Filtering Peer Review Redux The Marriage of Reader and Content Filtering and Searching: How to Find What We Seek Evaluating, Not Publishing, Is the Goal Postpublication Review 10: Too Much Content? Storage and Memory Authors vs. Readers Overpublication? Conclusion Work for Hire A Hundred Flowers Blooming The Way Forward Acknowledgments Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Conclusion Index