Will AI Chatbots Boost Efforts to Make Scholarly Articles Free? Peter Baldwin interview | EdSurge News, May 23, 2023

"...Baldwin’s latest book, “Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All,” looks at the history and future of the open access movement. And fittingly, his publisher made a version of the book available free online. This professor is not arguing that all information should be free. He’s focused on freeing up scholarship made by those who have full-time jobs at colleges, and who are thus not expecting payment from their writing to make a living. In fact, he argues that the whole idea of academic research hinges on work being shared freely so that other scholars can build on someone else’s idea or see from another scholar’s work that they might be going down a dead-end path. The typical open access model makes scholarly articles free to the public by charging authors a processing fee to have their work published in the journal. And in some cases that has caused new kinds of challenges, since those fees are often paid by college libraries, and not every scholar in every discipline has equal access to support. The number of open access journals has grown over the years. But the majority of scholarly journals still follow the traditional subscription model, according to recent estimates. EdSurge recently connected with Baldwin to talk about where he sees the movement going...."