Welcome to the Age of Information. At the intersection of rising enrollment and shrinking campus resources, “good education” is synonymous with “good information.” Starting October 17, 2014, UC Berkeley’s Open Access Week celebrated the Academic Senate of the University of California’s decision to adopt an Open Access policy made in July 2013. Forums and dialogues across campus discussed the dependence of free speech, equal opportunity, and education in regards to Open Access, a global movement dedicated to distributing academic research, technological advancement, and other valuable information free to the public. Open Access advocates equal access to knowledge; somewhat ironically, few students have heard of it.
The Academic Senate bill created an online repository called eScholarship with the California Digital Library, through which the public may peruse all UC faculty research. The program exempts highly profitable works like textbooks, books, and art, and any researcher may opt out.
The push for Open Access is not a new feature for the UC System. In 2012, UCSF inaugurated an independent Open Access policy, however, the Academic Senate proceeded with Open Access reluctantly, rejecting an earlier version of an Open Access Policy that same year. Only after a crew of student hackers broke into the UC Berkeley digital archives and leaked private research over the Internet did the Senate revisit the initiative.
Over the next year, a written correspondence between Provost Aimée Dorr, Academic Council Chair Robert Powell and UCLA’s Christopher Kelty probed potential shortcomings of Open Access. The administrators concluded that the California Digital Library may only distribute research documents provided they adhere to copyright law and not use the documents for commercial gain. Oversight from both the UC Senate and Office of the President would prove critical to protecting faculty research from exploitation or tampering.
The Dorr-Kelty dialogue also hashed out questions of cost. eScholarship requires several digital modifications if it is to swallow an influx of Open Access documents. Furthermore, the UC would need to either purchase material from for-profit journals or subsidize the article processing fees imposed by open access journals- open access journals rely on these fees rather than on sales for profit. The UC system has implemented an Open Access Publishing Fund to handle costs, but as Kelty admits in his letter to Dorr, “for better or worse, saving money is not the goal of this policy” and hopes that money saved by severing pricy relationships with for-profit publishers will offset any expenses that the UC System accrues along the way.
So what, then, does this mean for UC Berkeley students?
Open Access relies on numbers. In a world of commercialized data, a single organization could spiral into bankruptcy if it distributes free information; yet if enough corporations and organizations adopt Open Access, customers can refuse to pay for information, which could compel even more entities to join Open Access. The movement for shared information hinges on critical mass, and it needs user support to survive in our volatile digital world.
Open Access directly and unequivocally benefits students. As Kelty reminded UC administrators, “In February, new legislation was introduced into both the U.S. Congress (FASTR) and the California Legislature (AB 609). If adopted both the laws would require of UC Faculty that they make publicly available any federally or state funded research publications.” Since taxpayers and tuition support UC research, residents should not have to pay twice for information in which they have already invested. Returning to the question of cost, if enough UC courses structured their lessons around freely available research, students could potentially funnel money once spent on readers to funding for Open Access.
Open Access democratizes education. An Internet connection to eScholarship brings priceless information to individuals without access to education. Underfunded secondary schools can build curricula from groundbreaking research. Under the auspices of the Open Access Initiative, Cal students have created a digital setting for students to peruse academic texts and share notes. This online forum, known as the Peer Library, comes as a boon to students who have to shell out upwards of $50 for a reader they opened once since the beginning of the semester. The Peer Library’s collaborative annotations open dialogues and dissect controversies in the text.
Open Access also democratizes academia. The old system, a remnant of a world populated by floppy disks and library cards, put a price on prestige. Brand names sold both information and reputation, while academia dismissed free information as unreliable. Open Access undermines the politics and biases of publication. When top professors similarly release their research free of charge, new or underrepresented voices that have always published for free gain credibility, ending domination by balding white Americans (and Brits). This rule especially holds true for undergraduates fighting to break into academia.
Finally, Open Access promotes accountability. In recent memory, the UC has altered the budget, appointed a president without democratic elections, and glossed over human rights and sexual assault violations on campus. Despite footing the bill for the UC system, students lack a voice in the higher-up decisions that directly affect them. Since they have already given their social security numbers and bank account information to the University, they have a right to its publications. Everyone wants to make a change, but knowledge is the biggest investment in our future, our biggest asset. Generally broke, young, and lacking power, students have little authority, but information provides an alternative leverage with which to champion resonant causes.
For Berkeley’s Golden Bears, Open Access is one of those causes. Students can boycott for-profit journals. They can pressure educators to utilize open source material in the classroom. They can release their own research and source code to the Internet. Most importantly, they can keep doing what they do—exchanging, adopting, and innovating information. Internet culture and the dissemination of information have created an economic and cultural environment that threatens the sustainability of for-profit publication. They are the next generation of researchers and consumers, and they can utilize the newfound authority under Open Access to push the Age of Information closer to completely democratic knowledge.
A version of this article was originally published in Issue 11.
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