Norske Open Access pionerer og framvoksende teorier på likegyldighet og arroganse i akademia

Jørn Harald Hurum, Rune Nilsen og Curt Rice har kommet med i Sparc Europe sine Open Access Champions kampanjesider. Her kommer de med interessante og nyttige innspill til hva som bør prioriteres for å forbedre forskningskommunikasjon på globalt nivå.


Rune Nilsen har dette å si til hvordan bibliotekarer bør bidra:

The library is not just a support service. Nowadays, libraries must play a much more active role in disseminating scientific results. Librarians must continue to be a tough and politically active motor in promoting Open Access. Libraries can continue to break down academic barriers by providing equal access to information to scholars, students and teachers. Libraries can help eradicate academic apartheid for good.

Curt Rice mener man kan få alle norske forskere over på open access over natta dersom det er politisk mot til å gjøre det:

This is rather easy to envisage. In Norway, for example, we have a government economic incentive for scientific publishing. If this were to be restricted, such that it was given only to publications that were Open Access, every Norwegian researcher would immediately switch to Open Access publications – so the policy challenge is trivial.

Jørn Harald Hurum er inne på noe av det samme problemet som Curt Rice:

So apart from what has already been mentioned above, researchers in permanent posts can protest against the current Norwegian research assessment system bias towards traditional journals. 

Det er nok mye i at det er topp-forskerne og akademiske ledere som holder igjen for åpen vitenskap, for politikere gjør nok som disse lederne anbefaler, og forlagene har liten makt alene. Michael Eisen har nok mye rett i det han ble sitert på i New York Times:

“The real people to blame are the leaders of the scientific community — Nobel scientists, heads of institutions, the presidents of universities — who are in a position to change things but have never faced up to this problem in part because they are beneficiaries of the system,” said Dr. Eisen. “University presidents love to tout how important their scientists are because they publish in these journals.” 

Edvard Moser hadde lite å si til at hans forskning var piratkopiert annet enn at han ikke hadde noe til overs for det. Det er mulig denne likegyldigheten kommer av at akademia er låst fast i rollen som tenkere _om_ verden istedenfor tenkere _i_ verden slik Gary Hall i boka "Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities" som kommer på MIT Press April 2016.

In Pirate Philosophy, Gary Hall considers whether the fight against the neoliberal corporatization of higher education in fact requires scholars to transform their own lives and labor. Is there a way for philosophers and theorists to act not just for or with the antiausterity and student protestors—“graduates without a future”—but in terms of their political struggles? Drawing on such phenomena as peer-to-peer file sharing and anticopyright/pro-piracy movements, Hall explores how those in academia can move beyond finding new ways of thinking about the world to find instead new ways of being theorists and philosophers in the world.

Christopher Kelty på University of California holdt en forelesning på campus Davis 16. april om hvordan open Access kan bli ønsket og motstått på samme tid, mine uthevinger:

"[...]and the under-theorized indifference of the majority of academics to the open Access

question. Using his own experience in shepherding an open access policy through the University of
California’s academic governance system, he will identify some of the reasons open access is simultaneously desired and resisted, and reflect on the assumptions beneath this tension."


Det er bra vi har vitenskapsfolk som Nilsen, Hurum og Rice i Norge som tør å ta tak i disse vanskelige og uutforskede spørsmålene som trolig får et sikrere teoretisk fundament framover.