I recently came across a text, Anxious Geographies: Worlds of Social Anxiety, that like far too many scholarly texts is far overpriced. The book is $180 and the eBook is $50. In grad school I often paid more than this for texts outside of required reading. I spent a small fortune researching my thesis. I fully understand that the subgroup audience for many scholarly texts is rather small, and that the publisher is often concerned with just breaking even. However, that has not stopped more and more academic presses from releasing the companion eBook Open Access.
Consider Philosophy of Open Science by Sabina Leonelli. Stated plainly, directly at the beginning Introduction, Leonelli writes,
Openness has long been a guiding principle for liberal democracies, where recognition of the epistemic significance of transparent, free, and inclusive inquiry is a source of both political and scientific legitimacy.
Fortunately, we are living in an ecosystem where more and more university presses are waking up to the concept of Open Access. Not always, but certainly more often than before, the companion eBook is made available at no charge. This, of course, goes for academic journals as well as texts. Just recently the journal Functional Ecology announced they were transitioning to Open Access.
This is not limited to just the sciences. Just to give some examples, other texts I have recently found the eBook available as Open Access include, From Shakespeare to Autofiction: Approaches to Authorship after Barthes and Foucault by Martin Prochazka, “Ethiopia” and the World, 330-1500 CE by Yonatan Binyam and Verena Krebs, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports by Thomas Metzinger, and if one reviews Cory Doctorow’s self-hosted store, there are three free eBooks as well.
I stated the purpose of this website was to be able to share openly. I had intended to be sharing more research related material, and I still do, though as of late my schedule has not permitted me to draft these notes and memos. The point is the same. It is my hope that in some small way I can contribute to the moving wave that is encouraging more and more scholars to share openly, and not try to bend careerism out of their work or frame themselves is thought leaders, which is an imaginary construct that helps no one. I do not claim to fit into the subclass as “scholars,” but I can pass for a competent independent researcher, and this is something I have been doing for years. Why not share openly? The purpose of any scholarship is for one person to spark a flame and another to expand or be influenced in the same direction, or even a different direction.
Like music, scholarship is a dialogue. If that conversation is taking place in secret, how can the public ever hope to benefit from the implications of that research? If we really do hope for an ever-increasing, evolving, and reformed education system, these conversations must take place openly. I firmly believe that if education reform is not going to take place in the institutions on their own, we can move culture forward with openness and with the liberation of thought.