Digital Activist's Suicide Casts Spotlight on Growth of Open Access Movement: Scientific American

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-24

Summary:

"When digital activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide January 11 as U.S. prosecutors assembled a criminal case against him, much anger from his peers was aimed at both the government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology "This feels like losing a kid brother," Matt Blaze, the director of the Distributed Systems Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, observed on Twitter last week. He, like thousands of others, spoke out in defense of the 26-year-old inventor, venting their wrath at the prosecutors who expected to bring Swartz to trial in April for bypassing security blocks at M.I.T. to download more than four million articles from the online academic repository JSTOR (for Journal Storage). The sad irony is that the principles of the Open Access movement, which shares Swartz's goal of making scientific research universally accessible, although not his methods, is becoming widely adopted—without sparking the attention of prosecutors. On his blog, the Harvard University lawyer Lawrence Lessig praised Swartz's contributions to his Creative Commons and Rootstrikers efforts, but wrote, 'The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes, too. But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine.' The movement rejects the idea that open access means 'Napsterizing' scientific research. Instead, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and author of the 2012 book Open Access (MIT Press, 2012), the movement respects copyright and retains peer review. The goal, as he puts it, is 'literally, clearing away obstacles and barriers so people can get to the content.' He adds, 'Open access is lawful and we're making progress through lawful means.' The movement dates to 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative called for making peer-reviewed research literature freely available on the public Internet.  The cost of journal subscriptions had risen faster than library budgets for decades. In 2005 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) became the first public funding agency to adopt a policy tying grant funding to open-access publication; the policy became mandatory in 2008. In 2006 the U.K. became the first country to have all its major public funding agencies adopt open-access policies. 'Some were never enforced,' Suber admits, 'but that's starting to change.' Other countries, universities and agencies have followed—from Ireland to the University of Nairobi and two other universities in Kenya. 'A lot of universities say they couldn't [adopt open-access policies] because they're not Harvard,' Suber says, 'but Kenya shows that it's desirable and possible for institutions of all kinds...'"

Link:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=digital-activists-suicide-casts-spotlight-on-growth-of-open-access-movement

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.comment oa.mandates oa.usa oa.legislation oa.rwa oa.nih oa.green oa.universities oa.advocacy oa.copyright oa.libraries oa.ir oa.declarations oa.peer_review oa.impact oa.litigation oa.librarians oa.boai oa.prices oa.funders oa.africa oa.mit oa.profits oa.kenya oa.compliance oa.harvard.u oa.budgets oa.definitions oa.colleges oa.osf oa.jstor oa.guerrilla oa.nairobi.u oa.repositories oa.hei oa.libre oa.policies oa.journals oa.south

Date tagged:

01/24/2013, 12:30

Date published:

01/24/2013, 07:29