Peter Suber is a well-known open access advocate as well as the Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in the Harvard Library. In “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access” Suber takes a measured approach at detailing the OA landscape, and of likening it to a commons. Suber details the difference between royalty-free and royalty-producing content, and suggests some options for convincing those who make royalties off of their academic work to consider switching to an open access model. He also discusses the three major stalemates in the transition to open access: 1) OA will save universities money, but not until they have transitioned away from the old scholarly communication model; 2) universities may fear that they are paving the way for “freeloading” universities to reap the benefits later; 3) toll access journals are often perceived as more prestigious, and so attract more established scholars. Throughout the chapter Suber details challenges to the Open Access movement such as the above, and offers solutions. He ends on a hopeful note: “an online, open-access intellectual commons in research literature is growing from many sources for many reasons,” he writes; further, “There’s no going back.” (194)

 

Work cited

Suber, Peter. 2011. “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access.” Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. Edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, 171-208. Cambridge: MIT Press.