History of the term Open Science #1: the early days | chem-bla-ics

"Open Science has been around for some time. Before Copyright became a thing, knowledge dissemination was mostly limited by how easy you could get knowledge from one place to another. The introduction of Copyright changed this. No longer the question was how to get people to know the new knowledge to how to get people to pay for new knowledge. One misconception, for example, is that publishing is a free market. Yes, you can argue that you can publish anywhere you like (theoretically, at least, but reality says otherwise), but the monopoly is in getting access: for every new fact (and republishing the same fact is a faux pas), there is exactly one provider of that fact.

Slowly this is changing, but only slowly. What this really needs, is open licenses, just like open source licenses. Licenses that allow fixing typos, allow resharing with your students, etc. But contrary to what has been prevalent in the Plan S discussion, these ideas are not new. And people have been trying Open Science for more than two decades already...."