Open access to information: steps forward, steps back

The “open access” movement in scholarly publishing is one facet of a movement that considers all freely-available information to be a “public good”, beneficial to society in a general way.  Many practical issues arise from this argument, though, even among those who agree with its underlying philosophy.  Several recent news stories touch on the positive and negative aspects of freely-available information:

1) When the Google Books settlement with the Authors Guild was first proposed, many commentators make an argument like this:

“The plan Google is proposing is technically illegal, but we should support it anyway, because they have very deep pockets, and if they don’t scan all this stuff for us, no one else will.  And there’s no way we can get Congress to improve the law.”

In his decision rejecting the proposed  settlement:

http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&id=115

Judge Chin, among other points, rejected this argument.  If something is illegal, he says (I’m paraphrasing here), it’s illegal, regardless of whether it’s a public good or not.  He also questioned whether the “good” being proposed is equally good for all parties.  One brief against the settlement discussed whether the Authors Guild, the settlement party claiming to represent all authors, was the right body to represent academic authors, for whom the profit motive is usually less important than for trade authors.

2) The Guardian newspaper in England reports on the most-prolific contributors to Wikipedia:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/mar/29/wikipedia-survey-academic-contributions?intcmp=239

and then editorializes about how more academics should take part:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/06/in-praise-of-academic-wikipedians

Meanwhile, a professor at Auburn University Montgomery successfully included his Wikipedia entries in his “publications” for his tenure review:

http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2011/04/06/tenure-awarded-based-in-part-on-wikipedia-contributions/

3) The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the problem of university presses declining to publish monographs derived from dissertations, if the dissertation is widely available online:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Road-From-Dissertation-to/126977/

One detail of this discussion is that university libraries are the primary market for published revised dissertations.  If libraries decide, as a general rule, not to purchase them in print unless there’s strong demand, then presses should logically be more reluctant to spend money putting them out.  This affects the promotion and tenure process, though, since so many junior faculty members need to publish “books” before being promoted.

4) Robert Frost, the great-grandson of the famous poet, died recently.  He used the royalties he received from the poet’s works to create an Open Access publishing fund at the University of Michigan:

https://open.umich.edu/blog/2011/04/14/bob-frost/

The younger Mr. Frost felt that since the public generated this money, through sales, they should enjoy the benefits of it.