Free the Academy!

Artists have been appropriating work, sharing styles, collaborating with and stealing from each other for centuries, so it may not be surprising to find them doing the same digitally in the 21st. The Academy, however, has a slightly more rigid reputation for protecting individual contributions and seeing publication as a sign of success and approval from one’s peers. But the peer-review, journal publication system of academic publishing will soon need to contend with more open, and open source, publishing models.

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) project was created by a science professors and graduate students to free scientific scholarship of the expensive, inefficient and often elitist journal publication system. PLOS provides a web-based system where students, professors and others can publish papers to be peer-reviewed and ranked by each other and easily accessed online for anyone who may find them useful. The project has seen enormous success in its first field, biology, and has greatly increased the number of papers written and cited in that field over the last three years.

By removing the lengthy acceptance, review and publication processes, the restrictive subscription costs and the physical distribution elements of traditional scientific scholarship, PLOS and others have created a new dynamic dialogue of scientific thought in academic circles. Graduate student research is now shared across the world in a matter of days or hours instead of months, with negligible cost or even environmental impact. Scientists appear to be building a library of “common content” in parallel to that being made in the arts, and here again, it’s working. The major obstacles to this becoming the standard for scientific publishing are not from scientists themselves, but from the science publications industry at large. But, “the opposition of most established journals to open access has left it to new journals like PLoS Biology and BioMed Central’s Journal of Biology to lead the way” (Brown, 2003). PLOS now publishes three print journals and operates with a multi-million dollar budget from a variety of grant monies and is supported by large portions of the scientific community.

Another dramatic example of open academics is MIT’s Open Course Ware (MITOCW). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has recently instituted a policy of providing their course curriculum and materials online for universal access. The MITOCW2 project has proven incredibly popular to those wishing to learn without concern for formal degrees or the means to attend such a prestigious university. It’s also become a resource for smaller educational institutions with a desperate need for high quality course contents and curriculums. Other universities are beginning to follow MIT’s example, one that could lead to a democratization of the educational process where access to learning institutions is at least partially available to all (Fisher, 2004).