Ernesto Priego has invited me to speak at City University in London on Thursday the 22nd October as part of Open Access Week. I wanted to pull together a bunch of the thinking I’ve been doing recently around Open Knowledge in general and how we can get there from here. This is deliberately a bit on the provocative side so do come along to argue! There is no charge but please register for the talk.
The Limits of “Open”: Why knowledge is not a public good and what to do about it
A strong argument could be made that efforts to adopt and require Open Access and Open Data in the 21st Century research enterprise is really only a return to the 17th Century values that underpinned the development of modern scholarship. But if that’s true why does it seem so hard? Is it that those values have been lost, sacrificed to the need to make a limited case for why scholarship matters? Or is something more fundamentally wrong with our community?
Drawing on strands of work from economics, cultural studies, politics and management I will argue that to achieve the goals of Open Knowledge we need to recognise that they are unattainable. That knowledge is not, and never can be, a true public good. If instead we accept that knowledge is by its nature exclusive, and therefore better seen as a club good, we can ask a more productive question.
How is it, or can it be, in the interests of communities to invest in making their knowledge less exclusive and more public? What do they get in return? By placing (or re-placing) the interests of communities at the centre we can understand, and cut through, the apparent dilemma that “information wants to be free†but that it also “wants to be expensiveâ€. By understanding the limits on open open knowledge we can push them, so that, in the limit, they are as close to open as they can be.
Victory Press of Type used by SFPP (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One of the odd things about scholarly publishing is how little any particular group of stakeholders seems to understand the perspective of others. It is easy to start with researchers ourselves, who are for the most part embarrassingly ignorant of what publishing actually involves. But those who have spent a career in publishing are equally ignorant (and usually dismissive to boot) of researchers’ perspectives. Each in turn fail to understand what libraries are or how librarians think. Indeed the naive view that libraries and librarians are homogenous is a big part of the problem. Librarians in turn often fail to understand the pressures researchers are under, and are often equally ignorant of what happens in a professional publishing operation. And of course everyone hates the intermediaries.
That this is a political problem in a world of decreasing research resources is obvious. What is less obvious is the way that these silos have prevented key information and insights from travelling to the places where they might be used. Divisions that emerged a decade ago now prevent the very collaborations that are needed, not even to build new systems, but to bring together the right people to realise that they could be built.
I’m increasingly feeling that the old debates (what’s a reasonable cost, green vs gold, hybrid vs pure) are sterile and misleading. That we are missing fundamental economic and political issues in funding and managing a global scholarly communications ecosystem by looking at the wrong things. And that there are deep and damaging misunderstandings about what has happened, is happening, and what could happen in the future.
Of course, I live in my own silo. I can, I think, legitimately claim to have seen more silos than the average; in jobs, organisations and also disciplines. So it seems worth setting down that perspective. What I’ve realised, particularly over the past few months is that these views have crept up on me, and that there are quite a few things to be worked through, so this is not a post, it is a series, maybe eventually something bigger. Here I want to set out some headings, as a form of commitment to writing these things down. And to continuing to work through these things in public.
I won’t claim that this is all thought through, nor that I’ve got (even the majority of) it right. What I do hope is that in getting things down there will be enough here to be provocative and useful, and to help us collectively solve, and not just continue to paper over, the real challenges we face.
So herewith a set of ideas that I think are important to work through. More than happy to take requests on priorities, although the order seems roughly to make sense in my head.
