Group items tagged

"The debate on open access is a debate about the future of academia. We discuss the problems of for-profit academic publishing, such as monopoly prices and access inequalities and point at the limits of contemporary perspectives on open access as they are frequently advanced by the publishing industry, policy makers and labour unions. "

In this 2009 bulletin, Leslie Chan discusses the growing inequalities in access to publications. A striking example he mentions is that of a doctor in Africa who makes a decision to alter a HIV programme based on an abstract. It's interesting to think about the strides we have taken to bridge inequalities in access in the past five years. It seems that though some gaps in access have been addressed, there are still obstacles to be overcome. Another point to be addressed is not only allowing access to information published by developed nations to reach those who cannot afford it, but also hearing the results of research and findings of institutions in the developing world.

This is about the inequitable global power and how it dynamics the confronting global knowledge production in nowadays.

Underlying this notion of global knowledge production inequities is how developed countries "The Global North" dominate modern knowledge systems. This hegemonic control of global knowledge, driven by increased globalization, places pressure on virtually all societies to adopt global values and services. While this development does have positive implications (e.g. better understanding of modern health practices, nutrition, environmental protection, governance systems, etc), on the negative side, the imposition of cultural forms from the developing world could be considered a form of political and economic domination. This leads to the increasing homogenization of cultures and a threat to local knowledge, and the exacerbation of local differences and inequalities through uneven access to such knowledge and the means for it's application. The production of knowledge implicates and is implicated in power relations, as those with superior technology cannot only generate but also store, monopolize and disseminate information to safeguard their interests. Foucault (1972) suggests that the relationship between power and knowledge has its origin in the ownership of the means of material production and technical expertise. According to Said (1978), Western powers in a colonial and post-colonial context, using agents in developing countries, have been able to develop elaborate cultural and political institutions where knowledge production exists with supporting mechanisms that dominate and suppress African communities. In a critical examination of development policies and programs in Africa, Okolie (2003) considers these to be shaped by knowledge and assumptions about knowledge production that are primarily Euro-American centered, and are consequently "exclusionary and often contemptuous of other ways of knowing" (Okolie, 2003). The establishment of the continent's universities and research centers was primarily driven by Western powers, and the African elites who h

Compares the cost of articles from society and non-profit publishers to those of the major commercial publishers.

Its crazy. The numbers (of profit and control) for the publishing companies is astronomical!

Universities have received a poor deal from the system of private, subscription-based access to knowledge production since the port WW2 commercialization of the scientific publishing industry. It is absurd that the university or research funder supplies the content (the research), pays for the authoring (the time of the researcher writing the article), and provides and pays for the time of peer reviewers and academic editors. In addition, it often pays page charges or formatting charges to publishers. It then cedes copyright and finally buys back its own research at prices that have escalated at four times the rate of inflation in the past decade and a half! Considering most of this research is conducted using public funds, it becomes a moral argument when public resources are used once again to purchase access to the outputs of this research. The commercial model of disseminating research does not obey the rules of supply and demand. A relatively small number of 'core' journals occupy monopoly positions, in that university libraries have to subscribe to access their content, whatever the cost, because these journals have been established as 'must-have' resources. While the practice of 'bundling' offers the advantage of bulk pricing, it reduces room for choice, as bundles consume large chunks of library budgets, making it difficult to subscribe to smaller, individual titles. In addition, the inflexibility of indexing systems makes it difficult for new journals to establish themselves; thus compromising the potential for smaller niche subjects and newer interdisciplinary areas. Thankfully the global inequalities engendered by the commercialization of scholarly publishing are being challenged by open access.

Judging by the mainstream media, the most pressing problems facing capitalism are 1) income inequality, the subject of Thomas Piketty's bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century , and 2) the failure of free markets to regulate their excesses, a common critique encapsulated by Paul Craig Roberts' recent book The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism .

This article is primarily about structural change in the global economy. But Smith notes, "[T]he middle class that has paid for its ever-expanding consumption with rising wages is in structural decline due to the displacement of human labor by software; and the state's ability to manage structural crises while protecting global cartel profits is being undermined...by the ever rising costs of providing healthcare and income security and paying the external costs of environmental damage." He goes on, "What could replace the current iteration of global state-capitalism? If we assemble these three potentially transformative dynamics-degrowth, the recoupling of risk and loss, and entrepreneurial mobile capital-we discern a new and potentially productive teleological arc to global capitalism, one that moves from a capitalism based on financial hyper-centralization and obsession with rising consumption to one focused on more efficient use of resources and capital via decentralization and localized innovation." We might ponder how open access/open knowledge can play a role these transformative dynamics.

this is an Public Colombian intitution, that is using the conected learnig as a tool but what see as a problem and a possible cause of inequality is thar in my contry only 10 million people have acces to the web. is this making the gap bigger.

In Spanish.

La realidad que se vive en México es muy distinta a países como EUA, Cánada,Alemania, etc., existe una gran desigualdad y no hay unión. Tal vez estas leyes no den resultados inmediatos, pero son importantes por que quienes las promovieron creyeron en ellas y las apoyaron, y en un país como México es de reconocerse que tuvieron iniciativa. Una ley no va cambiar la realidad de un país, eso depende de las personas y otros factores como la educación y los valores. ------------ The reality of life in Mexico is very different to countries like USA, Canada, Germany, etc., there is great inequality and no union. Perhaps these laws do not give immediate results, but are important because they promoted those who believed in them and supported them, and in a country like Mexico is recognized that took initiative. A law will not change the reality of a country that depends on people and other factors such as education and values.

Me encontré con esta interesante reseña acerca de las políticas de acceso abierto en México.