Open Access week
Guest post by Brandon Butler, the Library’s Director of Information Policy.
Guest post by Brandon Butler, the Library’s Director of Information Policy.
This year’s theme for Open Access Week is “Community over Commercialization,” and it’s easy for those of us at the Library to understand the connection between community and the power of the dissemination of knowledge.
In his 1973 book, “The Sociology of Science,” the influential American sociologist Robert K. Merton declared: “All scientists should have common ownership of scientific goods (intellectual property) to promote collective collaboration.” This “Mertonian norm,” as it came to be known, long predated the internet (Merton first theorized it in 1942), but some scholars see it as a founding principle of the open access movement, which argues that knowledge should be free, online, and legal to reuse and share.