[open-science] Open access, scholarship and business

Mon Dec 12 23:15:51 UTC 2011

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 18:30, Heather Morrison <heatherm at eln.bc.ca> wrote:

> More broadly, there are many who critique the neoliberal (free market) ideology of the past few decades. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, my understanding is that even some of the intellectual founders are now questioning the wisdom of this approach. The reason that this is pertinent to the present discussion on CC-BY licenses and public funding is that many of our arguments (e.g. return on investment in public funding) are very much imbued with neoliberal ideology. In some areas, this may be necessary to work with local funders and administrators, if this is all that they understand. Then too, some OA advocates may well be proponents of free market liberalism. However, not every open access advocate is a supporter of neoliberalism, and in some places there may be opportunities to push for BOTH the public good AND open access, for example through arguments centered around the public interest rather than ROI. I don't think that consensus on these political economic issues is possible, or even desirable, for the open access movement. I do think that it is important to understand that we have this diversity.

In my experience, OA advocates tend to be opponents, rather than
proponents, of free-market neo-liberalism.
-- 
Nick Barnes, Climate Code Foundation, http://climatecode.org/