Long Road

Since it’s open access week I wanted to try and get down some thoughts I’ve had about this troubled term.

My own open access-ness–I’m an Assistant Editor for the Museum Anthropology Review, an online, open access journal; I archive all my publications on my blog which is licensed with a creative commons license, I’ve attached SPARC author addendums to many–but not all–of my journal publications, I tried to negotiate full access to my book through my publisher but succeeded in only getting the first chapter available free online. I’ve published articles where I critique the concept of open access, I have helped produce open source software that helps Indigenous people manage their own cultural heritage materials–which means, oftentimes, restricting access., I’ve archived my field notes, images and other materials in the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies archive where my donor form prohibits men from viewing several video tapes of Aboriginal women’s dances…

These activities of mine might fall under a range of connected movements: Open Access (OA), Access to Knowledge (A2K), or Free Culture. So where does this leave me…am I some sort of postmodern open access critic willfully mixing and mingling, producing a open access pastiche? god, i hope not.

What this mixture signals, i think, is the multivocality of the term open access where we find critiques and new models for: scholarly publishing, commercial publishing, open source software production and licensing, music distribution, pharmaceutical production and distribution, intellectual property rights, traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expressions, academic research, commercial research…

The crowdedness under the banner of open access is, to my mind, part of my own lingering leeriness with backing any general call for “open access.” I understand that social movements need slogans, they need bumper sticker size calls to action in order to gather numbers and gain momentum…witness: YES.WE.CAN. This is an effective strategy and, as any social activist will also tell you, a necessary fiction. These slogans, of course, conceal as much as they reveal.

On the Open Access Week blog they define the OA movement in the following terms:

Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers throw their weight behind it.

The rhetoric of “throwing open doors” combined with the universal goal of “unrestricted sharing” define a terrain where any type of access control or differing notions of “sharing” are incompatible and must be overcome–here the A2K and Free Culture movements overlap with and share a general disdain for hindering access. Although the focus of the OA week blog is publishing and research, OA in general seems to unite around this principle of unrestricted sharing and a critique of anything/any system/platform that “hides” knowledge.  Digital rights management (DRM) platforms used by corporations are defined as anti-open access and this term blows up to include non-commercial, non-proprietary systems that also seek to define access differently.

This slippage became very clear to me in January 2008. After giving an interview on the BBC’s radio show “Digital Planet” about the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari digital archive that uses Aboriginal cultural protocols to drive the archiving, distribution and circulation of cultural materials, a shortened version of the program ran as a news story on the BBC website using the term “DRM” in the title. When the story was picked up by slashdot and the iCommons listserve, “open access” was one of the main points of critique and debate. The slashdot comments (all 176) ran the gamut from down right racist to those sympathetic to a perceived cultural relativist view of Aboriginal knowledge systems. On the iCommons listserve the split seemed pretty even between those who were willing to see that the archive was not in any technical sense DRM and that differing knowledge systems must be considered as part of the commons–not an affront to some universal notion of the commons– and those who stuck to an all-or-nothing view of the commons anchored in “open access” as the default mode of knowledge “sharing”–circulation and distribution.

This divide is replicated in many projects and debates about OA, A2K or “free culture.” To my mind the tensions in these debates are both about access–who gets it, who doesn’t and how that is determined–as well as about a way of viewing knowledge–either as 1) something that is “out there” in the world for the taking (i.e. as long as you are willing to work hard you can “gain” knowledge about anything and everything), or as 2) assemblages of dynamic modes of making sense of the world that are embedded in cultural, social and political systems. The first version seems to result from the impulse to understand knowledge as an “non-rivalrous good”–something that many people can have or obtain without it diminishing for the rest of us–(it seems to me that this general notion gained traction in the Free Culture movement through Lawrence Lessig’s writings and has been recycled in many arguments against the expansion of copyright law). The second view of knowledge is more anthropologically rooted in seeing the diverse systems of meaning produced by human beings throughout time and space–one moves toward the universal the other toward the local.

The impasse is more ideological than practical, which is why it is so difficult to gain traction in debates about openness with laundry lists of benefits versus costs. What to do? One way to get out of this all-or-nothing view of openness that relies on universals is to clearly demarcate the issues and agendas. That is, publishing and research open access models should be considered apart from open access in relation to cultural heritage materials and archival content, etc. By becoming more specific we resist the urge to universalize and generalize and make open access a bumper sticker slogan that relies on over emotive notions of freedom and sharing that obscure the politics of access that are always based on relationships forged between communities, within institutions and out of the vestiges of historical inequities.