Open Access: “Information Wants to Be Free”?

The main points made in this document: - Internet mantras like information wants to be free misled OA advocates about what is possible in an online world. Amongst other things, these mantras led to the mistaken belief that publishing would be very much cheaper on the internet. - BOAI was intended to achieve three things: to resolve the longstanding problems of affordability, accessibility, and equity that have long dogged scholarly communication. - It now seems unlikely that the affordability and equity problems will be resolved, which will impact disproportionately negatively on those in the Global South. And if the geopolitical situation worsens,solving the accessibility problem may also prove difficult. - OA advocates overestimated the wider research community’s likely interest in open access. This led them to lobby governments and funders to insist that they force open access on their peers. This was a mistake as it opened the door to OA being captured by neoliberalism. - The goals of the OA movement are out of sync with the current economic and political environment.This is not good news for scholarly communication, for library budgets or for OA. - Populism and nationalism pose a significant threat to open access. - The pandemic looks set to wreak havoc on budgets. This is likely to be bad news for OA. - Rather than being a democratic force for good, the internet created power laws and network effects that saw neoliberalism morph into neofeudalism and paved the way for the surveillance capitalism and data extractivism that the web giants have pioneered. These negative phenomena look likely to become a feature of scholarly communication too. - Today we see a mix of incompatible strategies being pursued by libraries, funders, and OA advocates – including unbundling, transformative agreements and the adoption of publishing platforms, as well as experiments with scholar-led and “collective action” initiatives. There appears to be no coherent overarching strategy. This could have perverse effects, which has in fact been an abiding feature of OA initiatives. - OA advocates have unrealistic expectations about diamond open access and the possibility of the research community “taking back ownership” of scholarly communication. - While publicly funded OA infrastructures would be highly desirable there currently seems to be little likelihood that governments will be willing to fund them, certainly at the necessary scale and with sufficient commitment. - OA advocates have probably overplayed their claim that publishers are engaged in price gouging. Nevertheless, the industry consolidation we have seen has led to a publishing oligopoly that now dominates scientific publishing in a troubling way. And as these companies develop ever larger and more sophisticated platforms and portals, we can expect to see more worrying implications than high costs emerge. Unfortunately, governments and competition authorities currently seem either not to understand the dangers or are unwilling to act

Myth 48: Information wants to be free

Myth: The innate nature of information is to self-disseminate. It should be without cost and it should be accessible. Reputable scholars seek open access, and those criticizing intellectual property and supporting free information even take this assumption as excuses for hacking

Be Careful What You Wish For: Popular Music in an Age in Which “Information Wants to be Free”

This article posits that the widespread adoption of music recording files as the “preferred” form for the storage, retrieval, and dissemination of music is not, and never has been driven by users/listeners; that this is an oversimplified understanding of what has happened since roughly the turn of the century. Instead, the article makes the historically-based argument that what has happened has been driven by the industry side of the equation – even in the face of what is, again, an oversimplified understanding: that the record industry has undeniably suffered and contracted in size and revenue as a result of the digital turn. The overarching significance of this argument is an attempt to bring some much needed perspective to the many analyses of what has been going on in the realm of popular music and the music industry, and to suggest what the consequence of this state of affairs might mean for the future of both the music and its industry

Information Wants to be Free, but the Packaging is Going to Cost You

The question is this: where do we draw the line between private ownership and the public domain? It is not a question of choosing between copyright and patent, of choosing between hardware and software, or of choosing between implementation and algorithm. It is a more fundamental question that reaches back to ancient human values and transcends our current fixation on computers and software. It helps to put things in perspective. When debating where we and the law are headed (as we are now), it helps to know where we have been. In this regard, do not assume that software patents are newtrodden soil. In fact, software patents have been around longer than you might think. What was the first software patent? The answer may surprise you

Not All Information Wants to be Free: The Case Study of On Our Backs

“Information wants to be free” is one of those slogans that I see on t-shirts and tote bags at library conferences. Generally, librarians advocate for open access to information. In this chapter, I will look at the digitization of On Our Backs (OOB), a lesbian porn magazine that ran from 1984–2004, as a case study of where digitization and publishing this content online is inappropriate. First, I will locate myself and explain why I’ve been critical of Reveal Digital putting OOB online. Second, I will examine why it was problematic for Reveal Digital to put OOB online and will also look at why the reasons they gave for temporarily removing OOB were also problematic. ird, I’ll look at some of the copyright issues associated with digitizing this collection and I will argue that we need to go beyond just looking at copyright. I’ll conclude with a survey discussion of some other digitization projects that are approaching tricky ethical issues from a nuanced and thoughtful perspective and describe best practices, including having clear contact information, using appropriate technology, and working with communities from a community development perspective

Not All Information Wants to be Free: The Case Study of On Our Backs

“Information wants to be free” is one of those slogans that I see on t-shirts and tote bags at library conferences. Generally, librarians advocate for open access to information. In this chapter, I will look at the digitization of On Our Backs (OOB), a lesbian porn magazine that ran from 1984–2004, as a case study of where digitization and publishing this content online is inappropriate. First, I will locate myself and explain why I’ve been critical of Reveal Digital putting OOB online. Second, I will examine why it was problematic for Reveal Digital to put OOB online and will also look at why the reasons they gave for temporarily removing OOB were also problematic. ird, I’ll look at some of the copyright issues associated with digitizing this collection and I will argue that we need to go beyond just looking at copyright. I’ll conclude with a survey discussion of some other digitization projects that are approaching tricky ethical issues from a nuanced and thoughtful perspective and describe best practices, including having clear contact information, using appropriate technology, and working with communities from a community development perspective

"Information wants to be free!" - die politische (Jugend-)Bewegung der Netzaktivisten

"Die politische Netzaktivistenbewegung ist eine wissenschaftlich bisher wenig untersuchte Bewegung. Erst allmählich rückt die Bewegung in das Blickfeld, nicht zuletzt aufgrund der steigenden Bedeutung des Internets, für dessen Freiheit die Bewegung eintritt. Der Beitrag möchte diese politische Bewegung theoretisch, basierend auf der kritischen Technologie Theorie, deuten und empirisch etwas fassbarer machen. Hierbei soll auch geklärt werden, ob die Bewegung mit einer spezifischen Jugendkultur bzw. - szene einhergeht und wie sich die Transnationalität der Bewegung darstellt. Für den empirischen Zugang werden Daten aus einem Survey mit Jugendlichen sowie Material aus qualitativen Interviews mit jungen Netzaktivsten verwendet." (Autorenreferat)"The political net activist movement has been hardly researched. Only recently have net activists gained attention, not least because of the rising importance of the Internet - for Internet freedom is what the movement defends. This article aims to provide a theoretical interpretation and a more empirical understanding of the movement based on the Critical Theory of Technology. Moreover, the paper will discuss whether the movement is accompanied by a specific youth culture and analyse the transnational character of the movement. The empirical approach is based on data from a survey among adolescents and on data from qualitative interviews with young net activists." (author's abstract

Panel II: Public Appropriation of Private Rights: Pursuing Internet Copyright Violators

It seems to me that the story of music on the Internet over the past five or six years is the story of two fantasies colliding. The first fantasy is that information wants to be free, that with the Internet we can throwaway all the bottles and just have the wine and the free flow of data, which apparently was generated from somewhere and then circulated forever. So, there was that fantasy, that we would not need copyright anymore because everything would be available to everyone. The other fantasy is the record companies\u27 fantasy of perfect control, that there would be some way to control every use, every copy, of music that was digital