A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history,
current conflicts, and future possibilities.
Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our
fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces
fierce resistance. In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an
up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the
controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams
into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to
providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny
issues such as copyright and ways to pay for "free" knowledge. He also
provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a
result, advance one of humanity's age-old ambitions.
Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific
research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the
development of the university and research establishment. As he notes,
the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly
provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities.
Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to
producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and
institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world.
Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential
primer on the state of the global open access movement.
