Open, Closed, or Ajar?
Content Access and interactions

Elizabeth F. Churchill Yahoo! Research | [e-mail]

with Mark Vanderbeeken Experientia | [e-mail]

September + October 2008

interactions

In May 2008 Harvard’s Law School announced it would open access to the intellectual content created by its faculty members. This means content that is produced by faculty at Harvard will be available for us all to read. A driving issue behind this turn of events is the cost of academic journals. Certainly the costs are prohibitive for most individuals. But it’s sobering to note that fewer and fewer libraries can afford to stock titles that are directly relevant to academic courses.

The university’s blog post states, “the faculty voted to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy. Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar.” Contrary to some of the negative rhetoric around openness, “open” does not necessarily mean losing control of ownership altogether; publications will be made available with copy/share-friendly licenses. The blog goes on to say, “Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and

elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.”

Appropriately, this announcement rattled swiftly around the blogosphere. For many it represents a significant step, a step toward the vision for democratic access to information on the Internet. Commentators and open-access campaigners were articulate on what this means for individuals and for the broader intellectual community. Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, and John Palfrey, of Harvard’s Law School (also the executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative) are both long-term open-access campaigners involved in the motion at Harvard, who both blogged the event. Writer Cory Doctorow, who has benefited from publishing novels online before moving to print, reported the event with enthusiasm on the technology and Internet “pulse” blog, BoingBoing ( boingboing.net).

Even for those not immersed in debates around open content, it is easy to see that this is an important step forward. From its inception, one of the founding concepts of what sociologist

Patrice Fiichy refers to as the “Internet imaginaire” has been democratic access to content. Authors like Eric von Hippel, who wrote the 2006 book Open Innovation, have argued that closed knowledge bases limit innovation, stunt business potential, and reduce creative growth potential for business globally.

How does all of this relate to us, the readers and writers of interactions Well, directly. Recent debates around interactions illustrate how discussions of openness and open content are challenging traditional views of publication, content distribution and dissemination, and indeed the economics of idea circulation. This issue was foregrounded when the interactions website went live earlier this year, with a number of people expressing surprise that only the first paragraphs of articles were available for download unless one had a subscription to ACM’s digital library. Currently, two pieces in each issue are available in their entirety on the interactions site; they’re pieces that promote the magazine as a whole and the editors’ vision for the magazine. But a subscription to the magazine is required for viewing the rest of the articles.