To rediscover their public value universities can learn from the free culture movement | Impact of Social Sciences

"The culture of acceleration and quantification that arguably defines contemporary academic research is closely related to the information society in which we live and the technologies that support it. In this post Dafne Calvo, argues that the democratic decentralised principles of the free culture movement provide a blueprint for how academics and academic institutions might create an alternative to the accelerated academy...."\

Research results should be open access. If free software is defined by the freedom to access, contribute, modify, and distribute computer programs, free culture extends these principles to all types of cultural production, including academic research. According to a 2013 study, the multinational publishing houses Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Sage accumulated 47% of global scientific production. Generally, their journals impose fees, either in the form of subscriptions, or for the right to publish in open access journals. As an example, Sage’s open-access option costs $3,000. Accessing and contributing to scholarly research, is constrained by these paywalls, as not all people and not even all scholars, have access to the funding required to access and publish in these journals. However, such journals remain the top ranked journals and for academics to progress their careers, they are obliged to publish in them. Free culture, points to how research can only have a meaningful impact, if it is distributed openly. Current research assessment practices, place the greatest value on the internal academic assessment of research through peer review and citation. They are less able to measure the social value of research beyond the academy. As such, the academic community must actively search for formulas to evaluate the quality of research without preventing its universal access...."