Whither And Whence: A Theoretical Perspective On Open Access

Open Access (OA) is a response to the problems that publishers have caused libraries and researchers by escalating journal prices. The pricing crisis means that libraries must pay intolerable prices for journals. And in these two decades, there is a second crisis - the permission crisis. This crisis means that, even when they pay, libraries are hamstrung by licensing terms and software locks that prevent them from using electronic journals in the same full and free way that they may now use print journals. Together the two crises mean that libraries are paying much more in order to get much less. Together the two crises severely impede research. This is not just a problem for libraries and researchers. When research is impeded, so are all the benefits of research from medicines and technologies to environmental health, economic prosperity, and public safety. OA offers the dream of a "road to Utopia" with access to all of the world's scientific literature, free of charge to anyone with an internet connection. However, in the harsh light of reality, this road is rough, littered with sharp rocks, and is not clearly marked. Thus one of these rocks is the copyright.The legal basis of OA is either the consent of the copyright holder or the public domain, usually the former. So OA does not require the abolition, reform, or infringement of copyright law. Nor does it require that copyright holders waive all the rights that run to them under copyright law and assign their work to the public domain. One easy, effective, and increasingly common way for copyright holders to manifest their consent to OA is to use one of the Creative Commons licenses. Many other open-content licenses will also work. Copyright holders could also compose their own licenses or permission statements and attach them to their works. When copyright holders consent to OA, usually they consent in advance to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full-text of the work. Most authors choose to retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. Some choose to block commercial re-use of the work. Essentially, these conditions block plagiarism, misrepresentation, and sometimes commercial re-use, and authorize all the uses required by legitimate scholarship, including those required by the technologies that facilitate online scholarly research.