[ciência aberta]Fwd: Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind / Jean-Claude Guédon

[Iara Vidal]

Prezados,

Encaminhando artigo de Jean-Claude Guédon refletindo sobre o movimento pelo
Acesso Aberto e os 15 anos da Declaração de Budapeste.

Iara Vidal
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1360-6127
http://iaravps.wordpress.com

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Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind

[image: Jean-Claude Guédon]
By Andrei Romanenko CC BY-SA 3.0
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AJean-Claude-Guedon.jpg>

Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind / Jean-Claude Guédon
Introduction

On February 14, 2002, a small text of fewer than a thousand words quietly
appeared on the Web: titled the “Budapest Open Access Initiative” (BOAI),
it gave a public face to discussions between sixteen participants that had
taken place on December 1 and 2, 2001 in Budapest, at the invitation of the
Open Society Foundations (then known as the Open Society Institute).

Actually, the Budapest meeting was the seat of impassioned (and often
divergent) analyses and critiques of various dysfunctional aspects of
scientific communication: the slowness of the editorial process, the high
price of journals, and the failure to take advantage of the Internet were
all cited as obstacles to the deployment of an optimal communication system
for scholarly research. At the end of the day, however, as no agreement had
emerged, the idea of crafting a position paper, a kind of manifesto,
emerged: it was felt that the very effort needed to make such a result
possible would help cement the small group that had been convened in
Hungary, and help it to move forward - despite initial differences.

Thanks to the miracles of Internet communication, creating a position paper
worked. Convergence was achieved in the form of the document that emerged
on Valentines Day 2002. In fact, the virtual conversation among the
participants
had brought forth an energy and an enthusiasm that quickly transmuted a
term – Open Access – into a movement. It must be added that the textual
crafting of the BOAI was masterfully conducted by Peter Suber, who also
lent his felicitous writing style to the document. It started with a
beautiful and ringing statement that conferred a form of historical
necessity to Open Access:

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an
unprecedented public good.”

Wedding the old – the scientific ethos – with the new – computers and the
Internet – elicited a powerful, historically grounded synthesis that gave
gravitas to the BOAI. In effect, the Budapest Initiative stated, Open
Access was not the hastily cobbled up conceit of a small, marginal
band of scholars
and scientists dissatisfied with their communication system; instead, it
asserted anew the central position of communication as the foundation of
the scientific enterprise. Communication, as William D. Harvey famously
posited, is the “essence of science,” and thanks to the Internet,
scientific communication could be further conceived as the distributed
system of human intelligence. This profoundly human project – really, that
of the Scientific Revolution – corresponds to the bootstrapping of humanity
to ever-rising levels of understanding reality.

The very values of science that the great sociologist of science, Robert K.
Merton had identified were the age-old foundations, the ethos that emerged
with the Scientific Revolution. Indeed, thanks to new possibilities offered
by print technology, a distributed form of human intelligence had begun to
scale up in the 17th century. Now, with the rise of global computer
networks, the next stage in the rise of distributed human intelligence is
clearly in the offing. Open Access is simply a way to express the
cross-fertilization of the very culture of science with new technologies to
create the optimal communication system science needs.

With a few relatively simple steps, or so it seemed in 2002, the power of
networked brains could be unleashed, and it could be done swiftly, so
obvious and compelling was Stevan Harnad’s image of “skywriting” as it
first emerged in the late ‘80’s. Fifteen years after the BOAI, however, history
is teaching us once more that we must be both persistent and patient. Much
has happened, and much of it is positive, but taking stock of what has been
achieved has also become an urgent task, if only to get a clear sense of
our bearings: while Open Access is now here to stay, it also displays a
variety of forms that do not all conform with the project of distributed
human intelligence with which it is associated. Lesser, degraded, forms of
Open Access have also and gradually emerged, sometimes as the result of
power plays by powerful actors, sometimes out of compromises proposed by
people of good will. At the same time, the very multiplicity of social
actors now involved in Open Access has made the field much more complex
than it was fifteen years ago.

Meanwhile, digital culture is progressing apace, and its effects are
profound, not just technological. For example, the very notion of document
as a tool to structure thought, memory and verifiable predictions is
undergoing deep transformations that will not be fully understood for
decades. It took centuries to understand print documents. Open Access is a
spin-off of digital culture, and it cannot be understood without reference
to it.

In the absence of computers and networks, access to knowledge was limited
to what book dealers and libraries could offer. As a subsidized reader, a
scientist was limited to what was available in the local library, and this
was the best kind of access that could be offered in the print world. When
the same limitations were maintained with digital documents transmitted
over networks, many challenged its rationale. Perhaps legitimate for novels
and cookbooks, whose authors received payment for the material they
contributed, these artificial barriers made no sense for knowledge
production. Open Access, on the other hand, did make sense. This is
precisely what the BOAI expressed in 2002.



Full Text

Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind
<http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/boai15/Untitleddocument.docx>
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