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Wish I had more time, space & energy to write something more than a quick pre-lecture thread on this (I'm sure others have done so already or will do), but for now and before anything else happens I wanted to tweet about why the pandemic should bring home why #OpenAccess matters.
#OpenAccess should not be seen as a bureaucratic imposition or an administrative requirement. It should not be seen as a luxury of developed economies. It should not be an after thought. It goes beyond academia. It's not should not be merely a means for recognition and reward.
#OpenAccess is grounded in the concept that wider access and reusability of knowledge (in its 'material', shareable form, which is as 'outputs', articles, books, resources, tools, etc) is a good thing, particularly because _access_ is a precondition to development.
Without _access_, and without the ability to legally and simply share that knowledge with others, personal, social, national, international development is tampered, fostering wider inequalities between those who have access to the means to do things and those who don't.
#OpenAccess, is not trivial in these pandemic times, but not only because it would reduce _some_ of the material barriers (paywalls, though electronic, are material obstacles) to scientific knowledge about the pandemic. It is the very principles behind OA that make it relevant.
One of the biggest current global challenges is and will continue to be vaccine inequality. It has been for some time, but COVID-19 has made it (or should make it) completely transparent that access to the vaccine is a form of access to scientific knowledge.
Needless to say, the vaccine is an output of scientific knowledge which has not and does not look like it will be fairly distributed. Vaccine inequality is already causing huge disrputions worldwide, and it threats with undoing considerable progress in reducing inequality.
So when we talk about #OpenAccess we are not only talking about being able to submit to the REF or about getting more citations or whatever. It's not also about our own individual access needs and it's not something Sci-Hub can replace.
Need to go and teach but I might continue this thread later. Or not...
Political economy of covid-19: extractive, regressive, competitive. BMJ 2021; 372 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n73 (Published 22 January 2021)
Innovation Policy, Structural Inequality, and COVID-19, Democratic theory, https://doi.org/10.3167/dt.2020.070213 (Published 01 December 2020)
From ten years ago: "IP is not a problem... its [sic] IP management that is a problem", WHO tech transfer workshop 2010 [slides] https://www.who.int/phi/news/Presentation15.pdf
"extractive, regressive, competitive". Sounds familiar?
So when I said above in this thread "it is the very principles behind OA that make it relevant" I am not talking only about values such as fairness and equality but about something quite concrete: licensing.
