lowering of permission barriers. The removal of permission barriers that enables so-called full ‘libre’ OA is usually achieved through a form of open licensing. Traditionally, academic authors sign copyright assignment agreements with publishers, who then hold the exclusive dissemination rights to the research material for the duration of that copyright. However, all the initial declarations on open access, to which I will turn shortly, also specify the lowering of permission barriers as a crucial part of OA. Open licenses are structures that sit on top of copyright and under which the author uses his or her legal intellectual property rights explicitly to allow others to redistribute and, in some cases, modify the work in question. In almost every case this retains the demand for attribution. The most commonly implemented licenses to achieve libre open access are the Creative Commons licenses, covered below in Chapter 3.
These, then, are the fundamental tenets of open access: ‘green’, ‘gold’, ‘gratis’ and ‘libre’. With these definitions now covered, this initial chapter is designed to provide an overview of and background to the origins of the Open Access movement (which are important to consider when thinking about the humanities). The chapter is structured into three parts. The first examines the historical background to open access. The second interrogates whether, given its origins in science and technology, OA might be appropriate purely in the scientific disciplines. The third lays out the omnipresent voices of dissent.
open access: a historical background
It would be beyond the scope of this book to provide a complete history or a general theory of publishing, which others have more thoroughly already attempted.23 Instead, in relation to the rise of open access and following the pioneering arguments of John Willinsky,24 I propose a set of two different, alternative, converging histories: the history of the economics of recent academic journal publishing and the history of the free culture movement, which has its roots in the world of computer software. Although these histories are interlinked, in order to answer ‘why open access?’ it is necessary to know the history of the former and to inquire into the economic
