sunday thoughts on open access

The Access Principle by John Willinsky argues in favor of a fairer and broader distribution of knowledge across disciplines and social categories. In fact, it is in line with Moretti's book, which among other claims also argues that there are no more genius writers in the world literature. In fact, as I understand Moretti's argument, the concept of "genius" has been constructed by the literary scholars, who based their value assumptions on readings of a small sample of literature. In this sense, a research model which would embrace more texts could be more representative of a literary age. Moreover, due to the fact that there are no geniuses, literature is read in stages. As soon as one stage fades, it is quickly replaced by other stage. On average, one stage endures around three decades.

Willinsky claims that the access principle, will profoundly affect the distribution of knowledge in a world where the scholarly journals have lost their initial dialogue with the whole society, and have instead being isolated according to disciplinary principles and to the wishes of the big journal publishers. Furthermore, he refers to the fact that the access principle is not a continuation of the Wittenberg's revolution. It is something more, which is yet to be discovered in the future. I would certainly agree with him in reference to his opinion on the benefits for poor countries. It is true that there are a lot of underfunded educational systems in the world where access to journal subscription is reduced to a minimum. In this sense, open access can be an amazing opportunity for these countries and people to participate in the global community of knowledge.

With all the benefits, I still see some problems with this model. First of all, like any other change, the transition from the subscription model to the open access is not a smooth process and it will not be so in the near future. One important issue is the attractiveness of the principle "what costs more is more valuable" and the still dominant idea that "there is no free stuff in this world." Secondly, is the issue of the inter-generational debate: as soon as we don't have a generation of scholars, who were raised in the digital environment, there is unlikely to be witnessed a radical change in the distribution of knowledge.

Still, there is a chance that there will be nobody to witness this change, because all of the researchers will be blind due many hours spent in front of the computer. On the other hand, if digital environment is the one which will determine blindness, then maybe the same digital environment with its open access principle will provide a necessary cure for the blindness, in the form of any revolution in eye care. Finally, one problem might be the fact that if there will be found an attribution model for the digital scholarship, then scholars will rush to get everything online, hoping to get the feedback from other scholars, who will be also busy in uploading their own content online. In this situation, my question will be: who would comment on the uploaded content?

P.S. Disclaimer, All the similarities with the motives from Jose Saramago's Blindness is purely accidental.