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.
Author(s): Peter Baldwin
Edition: 1
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF | Full TOC
Pages: 415
Tags: Open Access Publishing; Scholarly Electronic Publishing
Cover
Half title
Also by Peter Baldwin
Title
Copyright
Dedication
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
