Scientific knowl
edge is a public good. In order to be used in a optimal way for further knowledge production or application, it is argued, scientific knowledge needs to be freely accessible. Yet, the current system of scientific knowledge dissemination with peer-review journals at the centre stage exhibits significant barriers in monetary terms and regarding institutional affiliation. Web 2.0 technologies promise to ease these constraints and to get closer to the ideal of free communication in the scientific community. They support the nearly universal and quick distribution, storage and debate of research finding while further offering new possibilities for the collective generation of new knowledge.The technically feasible however is not necessarily in line with publishers’ interests or the system of incentives prevalent in science. On these grounds an open access movement has formed which is inspired by the Open Source movement in the software development community, e.g. the GNU General Public License, Berkeley Software Distribution License or Creative Commons licenses. Advocates of open access to scientific knowledge are plentiful and span from the Alliance of German Science Organisations on the national level to the European Union, UNESCO and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) on a global scale. A prominent manifesto is the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities, which derives its content mainly from the Budapest Open Access Initiative by George Soros and the Open Society Institute. The former stipulates 2 main principles:
1. “The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship [...], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.”
2. “A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials [...] in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository [...] that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.”
It is claimed that open access to scientific papers and data would increase the visibility of research findings, speed up discussions, support interdisciplinary and international cooperation, facilitate technology transfer and that flaws in peer-review processes as well as in informal scientific communications could be ameliorated.
However on may also argue that open access isn’t a natural law or worldview but a movement or methodology having its origins in a specific historical, social and local context – US software development communities. Thus caution had to be exercised when transferring this concept to the scientific community. Openness and accessibility of knowledge may support progress but the question is if the organizational structure of science supports such a paradigm. For instance, John Wilbanks argues that science in contrast to software development would neither possess a „crowd“ of professionals with comparable and combinable skills (but rather experts in fragmented disciplines or subfields), nor would object orientation allow for a modular and distributed organisation of knowledge generation (on the scale of specific research questions). Furthermore technology still lacked advancement, e.g. regarding text mining and the semantic web. Science would also suffer from non-disclosure policies when private actors are involved in research processes as well as an institutional set-up and incentive structures unfavorable to the idea of open access.
Would it consequently be futile or even counterproductive to implement an open access policy in science? Or is it worth to try anyway?
By Vic February 20, 2012 - 11:15 am
Hello Ms Gobel, I am writing this to reconfirm a refrence that you quoted in your article “Open Access to scientific knowledge – an imperative? “dated on the 14th of January,2012. I quote your lines “A prominent manifesto is the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities, which derives its content mainly from the Budapest Open Access Initiative by George Sorrows and the Open Society Institute” .I would be pleased if you could please clarify if it is George Sorrows or some one else. Apparently a philanthropist who has a similar name backs this initiative.
And, just a question , don’t you reckon that vanity and scientific knowledge sharing paradigms exist as two parallel universes
Thanks
By Claudia February 20, 2012 - 12:22 pm
Dear Vic,
Thank you very much for your hint! I was talking about Mr. Soros indeed, altough I must admit that this has been one of my most creative typos
Regarding your question I would agree that scientific knowledge sharing is an idea that rather unfolds on the level of the scientific community or even society at large whereas reputation or even vanity is somehow an individual category. However when it comes to intellectual property rights in science these two perspectives are often formulated as opposing arguments (the two most recent posts of Mathis on this blog go more into detail here, unfortunately so far there’s only a German version). I do not think that this is necessary. In my mind authorship and knowledge sharing don’t oppose each other but build on each other, although the claims of these two positions might conflict. Therefore we are in need of common standards that try to reconciliate conflicting interests, grant rights to authors but also preserve sceinfitic knowledge as a common good.
By Vic February 20, 2012 - 2:01 pm
Thanks very much indeed for your clarification about Mr Soros and your explanation about knowledge sharing. So, Would you envisage at any given point in the future, the scientific community would freely share their work and knowledge to the under privileged like subsistence farmers for instance ? Or all the claims of knowledge sharing just a sticking plaster for PR ?
By Mathis February 21, 2012 - 6:01 pm
Dear Vic,
Giving free access to knowledge is a very old ideal. For Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) it was one out of four major scientific ideals. These ideals of science formulated by Merton in 1942 (see Mertons “The Normative Structure of Science”) are: communalism, universalism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism. The ideal of Communalism, which refers to the ideal of common ownership of scientific discoveries and giving up intellectual property in exchange for honor, seems to me very near to the actual ideal of open access. But as often mentioned there is a difference between ideal and practice.
Now I’ll try to give an answer to your Question: Will the open access movement and the new tools of the web 2.0 help to realize these ideals? To my mind, forecasts about the future are difficult. One of the problems about forecasts on the future of knowledge sharing that ‘science’ is no homogenous block. There are several different and heterogeneous scientific communities. Scientific research takes place in different context, in governmental, academic and industrial institutions. Knowledge sharing is a normative goal that pure/basic research communities might easier accept than applied research communities, especially when their research is connected to business applications like in agriculture. I don’t think that the appearance of new tools alone will be enough to convince all scientific communities to share their results.
But does this mean that we should/could normatively separate between pure science and applied science? Or between those who are willing to share and those who aren’t? Should we share with those who don’t share with us? And should sharing include all kind of scientific knowledge available? These questions aren’t easy to answer and the boundaries aren’t always easy to draw. Is for example research on the genetic code of a special enzyme, sponsored by the pharmaindustrie already applied or is it still pure? Should we give knowledge about nuclear energy to all kind communities, if we fear that it could be used to build weapons of mass destruction?
But even if different scientific (and also governmental and industrial) communities will take up different agendas, this doesn’t mean that all what is said about the ideal of knowledge sharing is only PR. As said in the beginning knowledge sharing is an old and strong norm to science. To my mind this just means that the appearance of tools and new ways of sharing in the web doesn’t help us to answer the normative questions about when, what and with whom we are willing to share. For now and for future we will have to look closely at each context before we decide if we share and what we share.
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