Open Access Archivangelism

My friend Eric Van de Velde, who did so much for the growth of Open Access at Cal Tech across the years, has just (over)generously credited the birth of the Open Access (OA) Movement to the birth of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).

I hate to have to throw a blanket on this 12th birthday parade, but the birth of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)  (a protocol for making online bibliographic databases -- initially called "archives," later re-baptised "repositories"-- interoperable) in 1999 certainly was not the birth of the Open Access Movement.

Either the Open Access Movement began (as I prefer to think) in the '80s or perhaps even the '70s, when (some) researchers first began making their papers freely accessible online in anonymous FTP archives, or it began with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) (2001), where the term "Open Access (OA)" was first coined (a few months after the first meeting, just as "Open Archives" had been coined a few months after the Santa Fe meeting).

Nothing here to compete in primacy for, however, since the progress of the OA movement has been dismayingly slow, ever since, and still is, to this very day.

But it's particularly ironic to see the origins of the OA movement (warts and all) attributed to OAI when in fact the idea of freeing the refereed research literature from access toll barriers was very explicitly (and exceedingly rudely) disavowed by the prime organizer of the three organizers of the Santa Fe meeting. The archival record for this seems to have disappeared, but I've saved the two postings from which the following is excerpted:

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 20:14:30 -0700

"…someone also forwarded me from the times higher ed supp 12 nov 1999:

"Harnad, who attended the Santa Fe meeting, said all conference participants agreed that scientific and scholarly publishing was being 'held hostage' and needed to be freed. 'They all felt ... . Most wanted...'"

"i don't remember anyone saying anything about hostages (though i did miss the end of the first day) -- isn't it demagoguery to impute words and sentiments?..."

The rest of the posting expands on these sentiments:

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/oai1.htm
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/oai2.htm

30 November will also be the 12th anniversary of the last time I ever exchanged words with the prime organizer in question.

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship