Open Access & Copyright: A View from the South – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"In all the discussions about open access and copyright, I want to add my story as someone from the Global South who strongly advocates for open access. Before I do so, I need to admit my privilege: my institution has a great physical and electronic library with additional free document delivery – so I can literally get any article or book chapter I want, for free, and during my PhD I had additional access to the University of Sheffield’s eResources library. However, I know that most Egyptian academics have no such access. Public universities have very limited library resources. We cannot achieve a more equitable global knowledge landscape when academics in some regions cannot even read what others before them have published (among other inequalities). This particular problem is shared by unaffiliated academics worldwide, of course. Three things happened last week to prompt this post. First of all, someone called me out on calling copyright an unjust law. Lawrence Lessig’s arguments here and here express this better than I do: publishers and not authors are the main beneficiaries of copyright. Academics regularly publish in peer-reviewed journals and not get paid a dime (funny they can get paid for publishing in non-peer-reviewed magazines!)."