Sixteen years ago, the Budapest Open Access Initiative predicted the dawn of a new age of scholarly communication. Its declaration begins, “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet.”
Looking back, we might want to suggest that OA advocates spent too much time in the early years promoting the merits of openness, and too little time working out the best way of marrying the old tradition with the new technology. In addition, more time should have been spent on establishing what other old traditions of learning would need to be accommodated (and how) if the new world of scholarly communication that BOAI envisaged was to be realised. That too little consideration was given to these matters doubtless explains why so much confusion surrounds open access today, and why we are seeing growing frustration with it.
In light of this, a new book by John Willinsky – The Intellectual Properties of Learning, A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke – is timely.
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