World's knowledge base should be open to all: Are you free? Australia well placed to react to UK open access initiatives

Abstract

ANU academics Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite in their 2002 publication INFORMATION FEUDALISM (Earthscan) emphasised the importance of intellectual property rights in the modern knowledge economy. They took their title from the medieval period when feudalism became a system of government and the majority of the working class had to live with the arbitrariness of ultimate power. They saw the need to establish public intellectual commons to protect against knowledge monopolization imposed by multinational publishers especially in science. University and institutional researchers create a large part of the worlds knowledge base. Researchers tend to give away their intellectual output free of charge to large multinational publishers who generate hundreds of millions of dollars of profits annually. In many instances academics provide peer review and editorial work free of charge as part of a misguided belief in academic collegiality. Depending on ones viewpoint of this Faustian bargain between academics and publishers, the scholarly publishing environment has been in crisis for a number of years, although the term crisis has been with us for so long as to almost nullify the term! The maxim has been Plus ça change, plus c est la meme chose.