(Personal blogpost from Peter Murray-Rust)
For me, open access begins in 2001 with the Budapest Open Access Initiative. This was a number of very active, committed people who put together a declaration of open access, meeting in a number of places, but particularly Budapest in Hungary. These are the 15 or so individuals who originally signed it and came up with this declaration. It's wonderfully written, and I suspect that some of that is due to Peter Suber, who was one of the early enthusiasts for open access and produced wonderful language.
Remember, this is nearly 25 years ago. "An old tradition and a new technology, that's the internet, have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good." I'm stressing the words "public good." "The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research. The public good they make possible is the worldwide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature, and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds." I stress the "other curious minds." This publication was not just for academics, not just for scientists, but it was for everyone. Everyone who cared about knowledge. "Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich." But now many people do not realize this. That is a critical part of the declaration, and this is one which is not honoured today as much as it should be. "Make the literature as useful as it can be and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quests for knowledge."
They go on to say that this is open access, talking about price barriers and so on. The more who join the effort to advance this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefits of open access. It goes on to define open access: "We mean free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers, other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet." "The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only real role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged." It goes on to discuss how you might do it through self-archiving and open access journals.
I'm going to comment on how much these wonderful ideals here have actually been achieved. It's my view that at best, only half the knowledge that we create at the moment from universities, primarily, can be called open access. That still many articles are published as closed access, and you have to pay $50 to read them for a day. This, of course, makes it completely impossible for anyone in the Global South to afford this, and it puts a huge strain on their libraries who have to pay this in many cases. So, at best, half the scholarly literature in the world has been made open in some way or other. Of that "open", many of them have barriers on access and reuse, which involves signing in, telling the publisher who you are, having to go through their portal, which is a surveillance portal, and having major restrictions on being able to use the full text for any purpose. So, open access is at best 50% readable, and I would say, at best, 25% or less reusable. That's a major concern, because if you have only a fraction of the literature available, then it loses a massive amounts of its benefits.
I've watched this over 25 years, and I feel at the moment we are in a form of stasis. The knowledge distribution has been captured by commercial organisations and other powerful bodies and is controlled in a way that means the publication process is done for their benefit and not for our benefit. It's also led to a lack of innovation. We cannot innovate in the method of publication. We can only do what we're permitted to do by the publishers. If we want to publish in HTML, the publisher may say you can only publish in PDF because that's what we do in this journal, and it's never going to change. Generally, journals have not changed their publication form in 20 years. There are still PDFs, and some of that is very bad PDF. I'm going to give a later blog on why PDF is a major destructor of knowledge. Just to say, if you try reading a double column PDF on a horizontal laptop, it's a pain in the neck. Nobody in their right senses would develop this as a technology now, but we can't change it because the publisher says we can't change it. So we are not in control of the means of publication.
The BOAI authors did not really spell this out because many of them were not working in high-volume science and high-volume data. They didn't say anything about data, and they didn't say anything about corpora as an important part of open access. In other words, they omitted the use of collections of publications beyond simply being able to read individual papers. Many of the original authors were people who are used to reading single papers at a time, and getting access to that single paper was enough for them. But we then, and now, tried to get the use of the literature as a complete knowledge bundle. We have not managed to get that. We do not have knowledge in a way which is open, friction-free, in the way that I think was envisaged.
However, it's possible to get some of this, and in some areas, there is enough in, let's just say, 25% that I've mentioned that's good enough for that purpose. We have developed an approach in semantic climate, which we'll tell you about later, which is: what can we do with 25% of the scholarly literature? What can we do with a 25% which we can use freely for any purpose, including the generation of new knowledge? That's what we are going to show the world in the coming open access week. We can't do all of it, because some domains are very closed. There's very little open access in engineering. But in bioscience, and to some extent, in climate science, many of the articles we want are openly available and reusable, and that is what semantic climate takes as its input. In open access week, we're going to show you the benefits of fully open access material, material that you can reuse without fear and without friction.