Parallel universes: open access and open source

The parallels between this movement - what has come to be known as “open access” – and open source are striking. For both, the ultimate wellspring is the Internet, and the new economics of sharing that it enabled. Just as the early code for the Internet was a kind of proto-open source, so the early documentation – the RFCs – offered an example of proto-open access. And for both their practitioners, it is recognition – not recompense – that drives them to participate.

Like all great movements, open access has its visionary – the RMS figure - who constantly evangelizes the core ideas and ideals. In 1976, the Hungarian-born cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad founded a scholarly print journal that offered what he called “open peer commentary,” using an approach remarkably close to the open source development process. The problem, of course, was that the print medium was unsuited to this kind of interactive development, so in 1989 he launched a Usenet/Bitnet magazine called “Psycoloquy”, where the feedback process of the open peer commentary could take place in hours rather than weeks. Routine today, but revolutionary for scholarly studies back then.

Harnad has long had an ambitious vision of a new kind of scholarly sharing (rather as RMS does with code): one of his early papers is entitled “Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge”, while a later one is called bluntly: “A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing.” Meanwhile, the aims of the person who could be considered open access's Linus to Harnad's RMS, Paul Ginsparg, a professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell University, were more modest.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Ginsparg wanted a quick and dirty solution to the problem of putting high-energy physics preprints (early versions of papers) online. As it turns out, he set up what became the arXiv.org preprint repository on 16 August, 1991 – nine days before Linus made his fateful “I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones” posting. But Ginsparg's links with the free software world go back much further.

Ginsparg was already familiar with the GNU manifesto in 1985, and, through his brother, an MIT undergraduate, even knew of Stallman in the 1970s. Although arXiv.org only switched to GNU/Linux in 1997, it has been using Perl since 1994, and Apache since it came into existence. One of Apache's founders, Rob Hartill, worked for Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where arXiv.org was first set up (as an FTP/email server at xxx.lanl.org). Other open source programs crucial to arXiv.org include TeX, GhostScript and MySQL.

In 1994, Harnad espoused the idea of self-archiving in his “Subversive Proposal”, whereby academics put a copy of their papers online locally (originally on FTP servers) as well as publishing them in hardcopy journals. The spread of repositories soon led to interoperability issues. The 1999 Open Archives Initiative (in which Ginsparg was a leading figure) aimed to deal with this by defining a standard way of exposing an article's metadata so that it could be “harvested” efficiently by search engines.

Beyond self-archiving - later termed “green” open access by Harnad – lies publishing in fully open online journals (“gold” open access). The first open access magazine publisher, BioMed Central – a kind of Red Hat of the field – appeared in 1999. In 2001 the Public Library of Science (PLoS) was launched; PLoS is a major publishing initiative inspired by the examples of arXiv.org, the public genomics databases and open source software, and which was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (to the tune of $9 million over five years).

Just as free software gained the alternative name “open source” at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed “open access” as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).

After the Budapest meeting (funded by speculator-turned-philanthropist George Soros, who played the role taken by Tim O'Reilly at the Freeware Summit), several other major declarations in support of open access were made, notably those at Bethesda and Berlin (both 2003). Big research institutions started actively supporting open access – rather as big companies like IBM and HP did with open source earlier. Key early backers were the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2002) in the US and the Wellcome Trust (2003) in the UK, the largest private funders of medical research in their respective countries.

Both agreed to pay the page charges that “gold” open access titles need in order to provide the content free to readers – typically $1000 per article. This is not as onerous as it sounds: the annual subscription for a traditional scientific journal can run to $20,000 (even though the authors of the papers receive nothing for their work). For a major research institution, the cumulative cost adds up to millions of dollars a year in subscriptions. This annual tax is very like the licensing fees in the proprietary software world. What an institution saves by refusing to pay these exorbitant subscriptions – as the libraries at Cornell, Duke, Harvard and Stanford Universities have done in the US – it can use to fund page charges, just as companies can use monies saved on software licensing costs to pay for the support and customization they need.

With all this activity, governments started getting interested in open access, and so did the big publishers, worried by the potential loss of revenue (the Microsoft of the scientific publishing world, the Anglo-Dutch company Elsevier, has had operating profits of over 30%). The UK House of Commons Science and Technology committee published a lengthy report recommending obligatory open access for publicly-funded research: it was ignored by the UK government because of pressure from British publishing houses. In 2004, the US NIH issued a draft of its own plans for open access support – and was forced to water them down because of fierce lobbying from science publishers.

Given the many similarities between the respective aims of open source and open access, it is hardly surprising that there are direct links between them. In 2002, MIT released its DSpace digital repository application under a BSD license, while Eprints, the main archiving software used for creating institutional repositories, went open source under the GPL. As the latter's documentation proudly proclaims:

There is a commercial, supported version too. Open Journal Systems is another journal management and publishing system released under the GPL.

As the mainstream open source projects mature, the applications used by the open access movement could well prove increasingly attractive to coders who are looking for a challenge and an area where they can make a significant contribution – not just to free software, but also to widening free access to knowledge itself.

Glyn Moody writes about open source and open access at opendotdotdot.