Don't Over-Reach: Grasp First What Is Already Within Immediate Reach

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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In the Hedda Blog, Reme Melero said:

"I think we should start thinking on a more wider concept, i.e. Open Knowledge and Open Scholarship..."

Yes, Open Scholarship and Open Knowledge are both desirable. But unlike Open Access to the annual 2.5 million articles published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals, they are not within immediate reach.

Why not?

Because (1) not all authors of all scholarly and scientific writings -- let alone of all "knowledge" -- want to give their writings away, free for all online. (2) Not all (or even most) book and textbook authors want to put their chances of earning royalties at risk. (3) Most novelists and poets don't give away their writings in order to advance knowledge and to maximize the "research impact" that earns their reputations, pays their salaries, and funds their grants, as researchers do. Rather, novelists and poets (like playwrights, musicians, artists, journalists and trade authors) try to sell their works in order to put bread on the table (or maybe even to get rich).

Besides, nothing is stopping any give-away author (of book, textbook, treatise or verse) who wants to make his work free for all online from making it free for all online. No one can mandate that he must do it. But no one can stop him from doing it either.

That makes it all the more ironic that it is in the one knowledge domain in which every single author, of every single refereed journal article, without exception, wishes his work to be accessible not just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to it, but to all its potential users -- so that they can read, use, apply, build upon and cite it in their own subsequent work -- that these special authors nevertheless feel that there is something stopping them from giving their work away free for all online.

What this special, exception-free population of give-away authors feel is stopping them from being able to give away their work free free for all online varies from author to author. There are at least 38 different groundless worries paralyzing them, copyright worries being perhaps foremost among them:

But it is precisely in order to free these authors from their Zeno's Paralysis that green OA self-archiving mandates are needed from their institutions and funders.

For other kinds of authors, it's only the fact that they may wish to earn revenues from its sale, rather than to give it away gratis, that prevents them from making the words they have to offer "open." (It's not their knowledge they are concerned to sell, remember, it's their words.)

Let us therefore first grasp what is already within reach -- by mandating green open access self-archiving -- rather than holding out for even more, thereby letting the unreachable Best get in the way of reaching the reachable Better.

And remember that the very first essential PostGutenberg distinction is to distinguish the author give-away work from non-give-away work so please let us not conflate them.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis. In: Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Chandos.

Abstract: Open Access (OA) means free access for all would-be users webwide to all articles published in all peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific disciplines. 100% OA is optimal for research, researchers, their institutions, and their funders because it maximizes research access and usage. It is also 100% feasible: authors just need to deposit ("self-archive") their articles on their own institutional websites. Hence 100% OA is inevitable. Yet the few keystrokes needed to reach it have been paralyzed for a decade by a seemingly endless series of phobias (about everything from piracy and plagiarism to posterity and priorities), each easily shown to be groundless, yet persistent and recurring. The cure for this "Zeno's Paralysis" is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate the keystrokes, just as they already mandate publishing, and for the very same reason: to maximize research usage, impact and progress. 95% of researchers have said they would comply with a self-archiving mandate; 93% of journals have already given self-archiving their blessing; and those institutions that have already mandated it are successfully and rapidly moving toward 100% OA.

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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