3ème Open Access Colloquium - École normale supérieure - Paris

"Now that open access has reached the tipping point in scholarly publishing, as this talk will argue, it is time to ensure that learning remains the primary beneficiary of this new approach to scholarly communication. One way to do that is to bring to the table the historical principles that have developed in the circulation of knowledge over the last millennium or so. By drawing on the historical instances of Bede, Hildegard, and Locke, the talk will present how learning has long been supported as a distinct economic and legal form of intellectual property, long before this concept was formally encoded in modern law. This history will be shown to cast some light on the current and conflicted state of scholarly publishing today, and to suggest principles for assessing various models of open access so that this knowledge from across the disciplines may be globally shared."