Open access means to make scholarly work freely accessible to the public. This increases the visibility of scholarly work and extends the outreach of research results even beyond academia. In our opinion, making scholarly work comprehensible and accessible to broader audiences helps to demonstrate the value of science and scholarship for society and may also protect research from political slandering. However, the SIG considers open access not only with regard to free online publications but also with regard to free re-use, e.g. by Creative Commons licensing (see also Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright). We believe that everyone should be able to use research for various reasons including exploratory analysis or artistic purposes. In addition to publications, the SIG seeks to open up various kinds of research output – not only academic publications and monographs, but also bibliographies, annotations, software, historical sources and other information and artifacts (see also Open Data and Research Data Management). Furthermore, the SIG considers open access not only in terms of knowledge dissemination but also knowledge production. Thus we address questions such as: Who has access to scholarly discourses? Whose voices are heard – and whose voices are silenced due to gender, class, ‘race’, or other categories of difference? What do we acknowledge as scientific knowledge in the first place? Who benefits from open access and who is left behind because of particular scholarly publishing practices? Where do come (national) politics and institutional agendas (such as funding structures etc.) into play? What kind of media dispositivs are created within the framework “open access”?
The SIG aims to:
- broaden the understanding of open access in terms of sharing different kinds of material
- and thus, promote the idea of scholarship as an iterative, open-ended process
- foster the free re-use of research without any legal, technical or other barriers in order to provide an inclusive and creative environment
- critically examine open access with regard to power structures and privilege
- and thus, approach interdependencies of technology, race, gender and other categories of differences with regard to concepts of ‘openness’ from an intersectional perspective.
If you are interested to join our discussions and activities in this field please feel free to contact the SIG members:
Sarah-Mai Dang, Franziska Heller, Dietmar Kammerer, Andreas Kirchner, Stephan Packard, Jeroen Sondervan (see contact details below)