Open Access Movement for Science › From The Lab Bench

"In the age of digital communications, social movements aren’t what they used to be. Using websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, citizens can now unite under a collective action cause without sacrificing their individual voices. According to Lance Bennett, Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, social movements today can “cast a broader public engagement net using interactive digital media and easy-to-personalize action themes, often deploying batteries of social technologies to help citizens spread the word over their personal networks” (p. 742).  Traditionally, resource-rich organizations have unified people in collective action, organizing protests and petitions, for example. These organizations have used digital media to lower costs of communicating with their members and to help manage participation. In other words, social and political organizations have started to use digital media as an enhancement tool for their movements.  But digital media is more powerful than simply lowering the cost and barriers to communication and organization across a traditional group-based social movement. According to Bennett, a new connective action paradigm has emerged, in which individualized digital sharing, in the vein of 'share your story with us' movements, can pressure real political action and change. This connective action, also calleddigitally networked action, involves personal action frames that travel over self-organized digitally enabled networks.  Personalized action can emerge on a large scale with today’s digital media – platforms can be organized overnight to bring together various communications for any given movement. From websites, to groupings of blog posts, to hashtags, personal message can mean more in their aggregate than they ever used to.  On August 26th, 2007, Bora Zivkovic published a post on his blog A Blog Around the Clock bringing together more than 80 links to other posts by various science bloggers, journalists and others in favor of open access to published scientific research. He also provided brief summaries of these posts and articles, for example, 'This is disgusting. This runs counter to everything that science, academia, scholarship (and scholarly publishing!) stand for.'  Zivkovic’s blog post arrived as a reaction to a campaign against the open access movement organized by actors including the Association of American Publishers and PR agent Eric Dezenhall. The campaign website, incidentally, was abandoned shortly after its release – much thanks to the power of the blogging and 'new digital media' community engaging in connective, networked action with a common goal ..."