should be able to reuse this material beyond the provisions of fair use enshrined in copyright law, as long as the author is credited. This is the removal of permission barriers that advocates claim is necessary to facilitate activities such as assembling a course pack of lengthy extracts for teaching. The removal of these two ‘barriers’ alters the current model of scholarly communications because, at present, access to research is only allowed when content has been purchased from a publisher and because, at the moment, one may only redistribute and use works in accordance with the fair dealings provisions of copyright.
The possibility of open access to scholarly research rests on several technological and economic bases, the contexts of which are all more complex than this introduction alone can suggest. That said, there are some key prerequisites that can be identified with ease. Firstly, open access relies upon the potential of the internet to disseminate work almost indefinitely at a near-infinitesimal cost-per-copy. This is because, in the digital world, the majority of costs lie in the labour to reach the point of dissemination rather than in the transmission of each copy. Open access was not, therefore, truly feasible in times before this technology; OA requires the digital environment and the internet.[1] The second aspect that makes open access possible, according to Stevan Harnad – one of the leading figures of the5 Open Access movement – is that the economic situation of the academy is different from other spheres of cultural production. Academics are, in Harnad's view, 'esoteric' authors whose primary motivation is to be read by peers and the public, rather than to sell their work.[2] While the labour of publishing still needs to be covered (and these costs cannot be denied), this situation potentially enables academics employed at universities to give their work to readers for free; this specific subset of researchers are paid a salary, rather than earning a living by selling their specialist outputs.
Stemming from the possibilities of these intertwined economic and technological roots, advocates of open access believe that the broadest global exposure to research outputs would be achieved through a system that did not require the reader to pay. These benefits are claimed to extend, among other groups, to academics whose libraries cannot meet the price of subscriptions and to the general public for whom much research material remains
- ↑ Peter Suber, 'Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access', in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, ed. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 171–208 http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4552055.
- ↑ Stevan Harnad, 'Overture: A Subversive Proposal', in Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, ed. Shumelda Okerson and James J. O’Donnell (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 1994), pp. 11–12 (p. 11) http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015034923758 [accessed 8 May 2014].
