There have been a couple recent posts around the blogosphere on free or open scholarship. First, Charles at Awilum started way back in July with this post; which was recently picked up by Tim Bulkeley, to which Charles also linked. Alan Lenzi has, in an apparently unrelated post, linked to an open-source peer-reviewed journal. David Hymes also has some thoughts on the topic, which appear to be inspired by this article.

The concept of open teaching is a fascinating one. For my purposes in this post I’d like to limit the discussion to a more general view of scholarship. By this I mean not only teaching, but also the research that comes before teaching (or publication) of material. As Charles pointed out in his first post, someone pays for scholarship, regardless of whether or not we can download it as a PDF. As someone who plans to have a career teaching, I would prefer to be paid for it. This of course means that students will be required to pay for my courses…regardless of how much I may dislike such a system.

In the midst of this discussion, I think it can be helpful to have the distinction that is often made in the Open Source software world; there is free as in beer, and there is free as in liberty. It seems to me that in many ways scholarship is already free as in liberty. At any library I can gain access to various books and articles, read them, and even include ideas from them in my own research–provided they are properly cited. This is not that dissimilar to Open Source software that is licensed under something like the GNU GPL or similar license. Biblical scholarship is often quite transparent and “open.”

I believe the real issue that everyone in these discussions is speaking of is not Open Source scholarship per se; but rather open access scholarship. As students/researches, we all want access to material at a price we don’t consider extortion. But how do we realistically accomplish this? Charles has already pointed out the fact that it costs money to produce scholarship, and so someone wants to recoup that cost (whether the scholar who produced it, the publisher, the university, etc). Tim thinks scholarship should be funded in a transparent manner and open to the entire public. I certainly see a number of good points with this, but being a realist I don’t see it happening.

In the open source software world the recent trend has been for companies to sell support for a freely available software package which they develop. I can’t think of anything analogous to this in scholarship–outside of fully funded research universities.

So, that’s just shy of 500 words spent saying that I acknowledge the need for open access scholarship, but I’m unclear as to how we get to that point. For now, libraries will have to fulfill the need, and all scholars will simply have to live near a decent research library.