Where Knowledge is Free … (part one)

On a quiet May afternoon sitting in a research committee meeting at the University, I was quitely watching seasoned academics debate about presenting one’s research in prestigious conferences and poring over the debate of what constitutes prestigious and then discussing the need for encouraging people to write more, be more productive with their research outputs and generally do more. At which point, I meekly raised the point of whether the issue of publishing in open access journals were thought of. That was the beginning of the journey.

Some of them had heard it before and had themselves published, others had not, and still others had reservations about open access. Open Access? why would anyone publish in a format that would make the work accessible to all and sundry and then the publishers who insist on open access in turn charge the author to publish research? The idea that an author would have to pay for getting her work published was not something that went down well with the academic glitterati that were more accustomed to the world of doing their research, and then publishing in prestigious journals of their reputed fields, not bothering very much about how the audience was built or who would be reading the work.

Yet, a lot of things mattered. As Peter Suber wrote in Open Access, academics write for impact, much less for making money out of their writing. I think more moot to this point is where this endeavour sets apart academic writing from either professional bloggers or their musician movie maker counterparts where the act of production is immediately fraught with the notion of making it for others where profit would be necessarily a factor to reckon with. Not necessarily so with the academic who’d, as Suber argues cogently is already paid for by the university or the workplace to do things that he enjoys doing, meaning making knowledge. Yet that knowledge, be it in the form of peer reviewing of literature that others write, or own work eventually falls in the hand of people who’d put a toll on the process of accessing it, and in the end, impact is not optimised. Repute perhaps in the way of the work being cited, but the true extent of the impact of the work gets lost as less and less eyeballs get to see and mark it.

A couple of weeks later, my colleague and a speaker at the meeting I helped to organise on Open Access, Anton Angelo repeated the same sentiments as he spoke with me over phone. He was talking about the old adage about the eyeballs and shallowness of bugs. Much of those sentiments, that is getting out to a lot more people if you allow your work to be cited and accessed free of charge, but more importantly, free of significant restrictions could be instrumental of further discovery if that were let go. The essence of Open Access, beyond the parochial interests of getting my work cited, strikes another chord here. It is in the ultimate pursuit of knowledge and disseminating my work and letting it free.

Knowledge is freedom. Creating knowldege, more so.

Rabindranath Tagore, India’s Nobel Laureate poet and humanist wrote about freedom of knowledge (“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high and where knowledge is free”). That age of freedom is now on us.

These reflections arise as I am going to sit over another panel that will deliberate the issue of Open access — the green open access (institutional repositories where you can keep your work and allow others to comment, while you prepare it for a journal submission), the gold open access (where journals will not only not charge fees for publishing it and letting people access, over and above it is ensured to be peer reviewed and people can cite and reuse it).

In an age of Internet and digital scholarship, this is time we unbound Prometheus. Once more.