These days, the news are full of acronyms dealing with various legislation concerning copyright. The problematic of copyright laws has long since left the geeky closet of the software community or the posh one of the poor and abused music industry. The acronyms in our title, familiar to most, are proof enough of their mainstream status. It is a central issue for the new generation, and everybody has an opinion on it. In this post, I would like to put the open access movement into that context, to see how it relates to the general public outcry regarding copyright legislation. Are these things connected? If yes, how?
The Internet radically changed how we deal with information. This is probably the tackiest line of the digital era, but its overuse is a statement enough of its pervasiveness. First, the change was heralded by all, without considering its wider implications. It was not out of shortsightedness because nobody could have known what exactly the new way of accessing and sharing information would bring. Nowadays, we are used to having all the information at our fingertips. Music, books, movies, news articles, how-to’s, videos, photos–all these things are only a mouse click away. They all existed before the Internet, but the way of accessing them is novel and unprecedented. Despite this, the industries behind them have not changed, or if they did, their changes were cosmetic at best. A good example of this is the music industry. Before iTunes, we would buy our music in shops on CDs and tapes. We would pay money to get a recording of a song for our own use.
Nowadays, we do the same, but we omit the hardware part and pay directly for the information. The model has not changed–it only mutated and left us with its essence, access to music. The application of this outdated model can be seen in the copyright hardliner’s equating theft and piracy. “When you download an album from the Internet, it is the same as shoplifting it.” Well, actually, it isn’t. By shoplifting it, I have made it impossible for the shop to sell it again. By pirating it, I just made a perfect copy for my personal use. Does it mean that piracy is not wrong? That is a point of discussion, but what it means is that it surely it does not equal theft.
Taking a psychological (or sociological) perspective, the media storm against the new copyright legislation is a clash of generations. The people proposing the laws, voting on them, writing them and profiting from them are from the good old Generation X. They are the serious establishment–governments and their agencies, big money advocating groups and industry representatives and a slew of other interest groups. They were by and large raised and socialized in a society before the advent of the Internet. They understand the concept, use it to profit but they don’t have the instinctive feeling for it. It’s a new development for them, something to adapt to, not the natural setting. Naturally, when it comes to the world wide web, they apply models t h e y are familiar with. However, more often than not, those models prove to be ineffective in the new digital word of such subtleties that differentiate between stealing and pirating.
The Generation Y, on the other hand, live and breathe the Internet. They are the digital natives. They use what new information technology has to offer to its full potential, remixing and tweaking to no end. Most importantly, the Generation X models of access are alien to them. Rather than copyright, they are copyleft. On a practical level, the understanding of the previously described theft-piracy dichotomy is something natural to them. Of course, nothing is that black and white–I am sure there are people in their sixties who are avid copylefters and people in their twenties who would sign all the ACTAs, SOPAs, and PIPAs in the world. But that only proves that people are people are people, and that the copyright laws are actually the newest permutation of the young vs. old conflict.
What does this have to do with open access?
The scientific community, in some part, is just on the outskirts of this issue. Access to science is vital to the experts–a relatively small, homogeneous, close knit community of people. We too have inherited the business models from times when scientific journals were mailed to readers in hard copies. On the other side, science is a central part of the modern democratic establishment. This might not be that obvious for a relatively profit non-intensive field like psychology, but there are big bucks in science. And when you are a publishing house, having practical monopoly on what gets published and read, you just might abuse it. The consequence of these two traits of scientific publishing–the expert and the profit intensive–is that it was dominated by the establishment.
The request for public access to research results has started deconstructing the expert intensive part of scientific publishing (its exclusiveness) while the new movement in business models native to the Internet has helped in dismantling the business side of the problem. Through this, the open access movement has started eroding the old publishing models, but it is a slow process. The disorganization and lack of coordination between green and gold OA routes has not helped either.
All in all, we should recognize that the open access movement is just another facet of the copyright discussions that are shaking our society. The topic is getting wide traction, and we should use it to the maximum to push scientific publishing models to their limits. Access to research should be as important as is access to Youtube, Wikipedia or other popular sites–if not even more.
References and links for further reading
Grant, B. (2009, May 7). Elsevier published 6 fake journals. The Scientist. Retrieved from: http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55679/
N. N. (2012, Feb 11). Acta up. The Economist. Retrieved from: http://www.economist.com/node/21547235
Taylor, M. (2012, Jan 18). Oppose SOPA, PIPA and the RWA. Retrieved from: http://reprog.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/oppose-sopa-pipa-and-the-rwa/
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (2012). Retrieved from: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2011/may/tradoc_147937.pdf
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Ivan Flis is a graduate student of psychology at the Center for Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of European Psychology Students (JEPS) and the Chair of the Right to Research Coalition Coordinating Committee for Africa, Europe and Middle East.
