Universities produce an immense amount of information. For
their students academics write lecture notes, create course guides, and
put together bibliographies. They may well also record their lectures
and any events they take part in. But teaching is not all that academics
do. They often have to write a certain number of journal articles per
year and university funding is often in large part based upon the amount
and quality of the research done by the institution. A large part of
their output is therefore is large quantities of research often funded
by the state. As a result academic publishers pay very little to
academics (if at all) for the journal articles they publish. Yet the
final journal articles when they are published individually online often
cost more than $30, and considerably more than that for the whole
journal or for it in physical form.[1] Academic books are similarly expensive, sometimes costing over $100.
High costs for access to academic work used to make sense as unlike
publishing for the broad consumer market publishers would only sell a
few hundred copies. Small print runs meant that each individual book was
expensive to produce. Today however much of the cost can be taken out
of the system through publishing online; there is no need for the
physical manufacturing of books and journal articles as they can simply
be put on the internet. This not only reduces the overall cost but makes
the marginal cost of providing access almost nothing.
While it is perhaps still the norm for access to knowledge to be kept
private to universities and journals to be behind paywalls this is now
rapidly beginning to change. Open access has been growing rapidly
despite opposition from publishers from around 20,000 articles in 2000
to 350,000 today.[2]
Around 30% of peer reviewed journals are already open access and
governments are working to increase this number. The Research Councils
UK (the main pathway for government funding for research in the UK)
will, from April 2013, only fund research if it will be available to the
public.[3]
The European Union is to follow suit and aim “for 60% of European
publicly-funded research articles to be available under open access by
2016.”[4]
Courses are being opened up in the same way, universities found that
they could not sell their course materials online, but many decided
instead to put some of their online courseware online for free. This
includes some of the most prestigious universities such as MIT, Yale,
and Berkley.[5]
In this instance by available to the general public we don’t just
mean that they are available when a member of the public goes into the
university and asks for the materials but that they are actively made
available; such as being published on the internet.
Asking for all academic work seems to imply that essentially all work
that everyone involved in the university undertakes should be available
to the general public. However this may be going a bit far; making
every essay by every student available would potentially make it
difficult to set similar questions in the future by encouraging
plagiarism. More questionable would be whether books should be included
or excluded. For the proposition there are not many advantages to
including books while creating the disadvantage that it would
practically eliminate the incentive to publish books on academic issues.
Another area that could conceivably be included would be whole online
courses that allow for remote learning towards receiving a
qualification; the arguments for and against this however while they
overlap are different. For this debate I am therefore focusing on
academic journals and course materials.
[1] Monbiot, George, “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”, The Guardian, 29 August 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist
[2] Curry, Stephen, “The inexorable rise of open access scientific publishing”, guardian.co.uk, 22 October 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/occams-corner/2012/oct/22/inexorable-rise-open-access-scientific-publishing
[3] Suber, Peter, “Ensuring open access for publicly funded research”, BMJ, 8 August 2012, 345:e5184, http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e5184#ref-2
[4] Kroes, Neelie, “Scientific data: open access to research results will boost Europe's innovation capacity”, Europa.eu, 17 July 2012. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-790_en.htm?locale=en
[5] Walsh, Taylor, Unlocking the Gates, Princeton University Press, 2011, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uudfxXEmyG0C pp.xvii-xix.
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