Some Thoughts on Aaron Swartz, Open Access, and the Future of Historical Research « The Past Speaks

" ... Essentially, advocates of the Open Access model believe that the articles published in academic journals should be placed online for everyone to read for free. Right now, most scholarly journals are available only to subscribers, which means that unless you have a university library card, you can’t log in to read an article that is of interest to you. (Some databases of journals, such as Jstor, allow non-subscribers to purchase access to an article. In the social sciences the price of access is normally between $20 and $40 per article ... Most advocates of Open Access have contented themselves with merely demanding change. There are, however, activists who have engaged in what they call civil disobedience and what others characterise as theft. Aaron Swartz was perhaps the best known of these activists... His death at the age of 26 has been mourned by many advocates of Open Access, who blame US prosecutors for hounding him to his grave.  The district attorney responsible for the prosecution defended herself yesterday by saying that she had only sought a six-month prison term!  I don’t expect that the United States will adopt the Open Access model any time soon. It simply isn’t compatible with the strong property-rights orientation of American political culture... More collectivist countries are, however, moving towards the Open Access model of scholarly publishing.  Case in point, the United Kingdom... Critics of the Finch Gold Open Access model immediately pointed out that this model would put an additional strain on university budgets. For instance, if the average social scientist at a British university publishes 1.5 articles every year and the journals charge, say, £1,500 to publish each article, the total impact will be huge. Where will this money come from?  The government appears to think that it would come from a proportionate reduction in university library budgets. Eventually, the Open Access model may possibly reduce the costs of journal subscriptions for university libraries. (Personally, I don’t think this will happen unless the United States also adopts the Open Access model). Eventually, that could free up some funds to transfer to the research budgets of universities, but that won’t happen in the short term... Moreover, young academics, such as PhD students do not have access to the research budgets that a tenure-track professor does. This means that if a PhD student wants to publish an article, they will have to defray the costs out of their own pocket. This puts PhD students in a difficult situation, for in today’s job market, simply having a PhD is not enough to land your first academic job. You need to have at least one peer-reviewed article under your belt... The shift to Open Access has implications for all academic disciplines.  Today, the Institute of Historical Research in London is hosting a conference about what Open Access means for historians. See details here. (I’ve pasted the full programme below). I can’t attend (for one thing, the country is blanketed in a foot of snow) but I would be grateful if a reader could send me a summary of what was said there..."