Open Access logo, a stylized representation of an open padlock
21 January 2021
How does a term relating to sexual freedom and sex work become a rallying cry for librarians and academic researchers?
Open access is a buzzword in academia today, referring to a mode of publishing where any reader can view the published work for free. To understand the necessity of the concept, one must first understand the business model of academic publishing. A researcher, almost always employed by a university which pays their salary, conducts the research, which is often funded by government grants. They then submit it to a journal for publication. The editor, who, except for the largest journals, is a fellow academic who receives little or no compensation, then farms it out to a number of unpaid, volunteer, peer reviewers, fellow academics in the same field, who make recommendations for changes and as to whether or not it should be published. (This step can be repeated several times until the piece passes muster.) The editor makes the publication decision. The publisher sells the journal, at often exorbitant prices so that it is pretty much only bought by university libraries. The publisher not only gets free labor, but then charges those who funded and produced the work for access to it. It’s quite a racket, subsidized by the researchers, the universities, and taxpayers. Open access seeks to change this business model, reduce the cost of the academic enterprise, and make available the results of research to a wider range of researchers who can build on the work, especially those not affiliated with research universities that can afford to pay the high costs of the journals.
Open access publishing, on the other hand, comprises a number of different business models for funding the publication, with the common factor being that final publication is available to all at no cost (other than perhaps that of internet access).
But this sense of open access is quite recent, and the phrase dates to the sixteenth century, originally referring to sexual license, being open to sexual advances, and prostitution. A 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives has this:
But he that rauisheth or forcibly taketh awaye a free woman, is only condemned to paye a hundred siluer drachmes. And he that was the Pandor to procure her, should only paye twenty drachmes. Onles she had bene a common strumpet or curtisan: for such doe iustefy open accesse, to all that will hier them.
Other early uses of the phrase are in the same context.
By the mid eighteenth century however, the sense of the phrase had generalized and lost its sexual connotation, coming to mean a freedom to engage in communications and dealings with others regardless of social status. From the preface to a 1762 biography of British politician Richard Nash:
He was the first who diffused a desire of society, and an easiness of address among a whole people who were formerly censured by foreigners for a reservedness of behaviour, and an aukward timidity in their first approaches. He first taught a familiar intercourse among strangers at Bath and Tunbridge, which still subsists among them. That ease and open access first acquired there, our gentry brought back. to the metropolis, and thus the whole kingdom by degrees became more refined by lessons originally derived from him.
And by the end of the eighteenth century, open access was being used quite literally to refer to general availability of something. From the 1793 Patriot, a pamphlet about revolutionary France written by the political reformer (not the novelist) Thomas Hardy:
By the Constituent Assembly, [liberty] was understood to imply an equal participation of privileges, and an open access to office and employment, indiscriminately provided for all ranks of men: this was the good sense of the term.
Open access entered the discourse of librarians in the waning years of the nineteenth century, referring to the practice of open stacks, allowing patrons the freedom to browse books on the libraries’ shelves. This is, of course, a more specialized application of the general sense given above. From the 1894 volume of the journal The Library:
Somewhere about 1725, Allan Ramsay, a Scots poet, established in Edinburgh a circulating library, to the shelves of which the readers had open access. Since then, every proprietary library, society library and mechanics’ institute has allowed direct access with more or less freedom. In Cambridge Public Library the practice dates from 1858; and the British Museum and Patent Office, London, furnish examples of unrestricted access to shelves probably unequalled anywhere outside the Australian colonies. The practice is one of very long standing in Britain, and though far from general in public libraries will probably be extended to most of them in the course of a few years.
By the 1990s, the excessive cost and long-term sustainability of the traditional academic publishing model began to be called into question, and the movement toward what would become known as open access began, the name probably taken out of its familiarity in a library context. A 2001 conference in Budapest drew together various efforts in this regard and formed the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and the group’s public statement in February 2002 was one of the first uses of open access in this particular sense:
For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact.
[...]
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
That’s how a term originally associated with bawds, courtesans, and prostitutes made its way into the ivory tower.
Sources:
“American and British Libraries.—Fytte 2.” The Library, vol. 6. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co., 1894, 114. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Budapest Open Access Initiative, 14 February 2002.
Goldsmith, Oliver, ed. The Life of Richard Nash, second edition. London: J. Newberry, 1762, vii. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Hardy, Thomas. The Patriot: Addressed to the People, on the Present State of Affairs in Britain and in France. Edinburgh: J. Dickson, 1793, 56. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2004, s.v. open access, n. and adj.
Plutarch. “The Life of Solon.” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Compared Together. Thomas North, trans. London: Thomas Vautroullier and John Wright, 1579, 100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Image credits: Logo designed by the Public Library of Science (PLoS); public domain graphic.