Open Access in Historical Context | History of Scholarly Communication

"As Open Access Week commences, and the community rightly celebrates its achievement and discusses what needs to happen in the future, I thought I might take a chance to reflect on open access historically.  Rather than looking at the Budapest Initiative and the development of current open access developments, however, I thought I might go back even further in time, to the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the U.S. (a topic I cover quite widely within this blog) Coincidentally, this period is also the point in time when the scholarly communication system as we know it began to develop in the U.S..  What might the term “open access” mean to someone then?  Additionally, could that definition help current open access advocates think about where we want to go in the future?"