Public Knowledge Project founder pleads for 'culture of sharing "

Public Knowledge Project founder pleads for 'culture of sharing "

The free access to scientific literature and thus the results of publicly funded research, for the advocates of the Open Access movement, is only at first glance, a break with the commercialization of scientific publications and is about creeping intellectual property rights dar. This thesis represented Stanford Professor John Willinsky, PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference in 2011 at the Free University of Berlin. Historically, the culture of sharing of results and findings would be very much older than the publishing industry and in general even than the invention of printing.

The three-day international event with 250 participants from 40 countries, it is - 20 years after the opening of the preprint server at Los Alamos National Laboratory xxx.lanl.gov in the U.S., the first made by high-energy physicists their essays available to the public, and 10 years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which called in December 2001 for free and unrestricted access to scientific literature on the Internet - to the state, the prospects and obstacles to scientific communication in the Internet age.

Willinsky was 1998, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) was established at the University of British Columbia from life on the basis of free and open software editing systems for the publication of journals (Open Journal Systems) and to conduct meetings (Open Conference Systems) developed to be less dependent on commercial science publishers and their business models based on access restrictions to be. According to his data, there are now more than 10,000 installations worldwide, half of them in developing countries. If should be created in this way, only 5,000 new e-journals, then the make, depending on the estimate 10 to 20 percent of the world's scientific journals. "That was not our intention, but we are now the responsibility." What matters now is to ensure the further development of the system running.

In his Keynote Willinsky tried to explain "why we attach the idea that scientific knowledge should circulate as freely and as much as possible." For this he got far into the past. Already in the early Middle Ages was the intellectual life in religious communities and monasteries, the precursors of the universities represented a counterweight to the secular system of ownership. , Demanded as the Rule of the Benedictines since the founding of the Order in the sixth century, the renunciation of personal property. In the monastery the monks parlors books duplicated by laborious copying and enriched them by marginal notes, with their knowledge, but "nobody had the books" and they were eagerly lent or exchanged and passed on their contents, as Willinsky executed. So the monks' values ​​for the next group of readers "had created.

This sharing instead of exclusion not even stand in contrast to the much later in the 17th Century medieval philosophy of John Locke, who regarded it as a natural right to property that you acquire through work. That means, in essence, "we have a right to property because the value created," said Willensky. This view is rooted in the Anglo-Saxon countries, especially strong where "the property, is in many cases at least, to democracy."

But also in science values ​​would be created. "In the academic community, we have created an economy in which value is created through the joint use". The value added but only come into play when the science is public, so others can pick up on and further develop the findings. "Traces of the monastic approach", as a counter to the commercial production world, Willinsky looks at the universities still exist. "We are dealing with a different type of intellectual property as Lady GaGa," he said, "but we tend to lose sight of that."