• Open Access and Symbolic Gift Giving

    Author(s):
    Ulrich Herb (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    Library & Information Science
    Subject(s):
    Information science, Library science, Sociology, Open access publishing, Science
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    scientific publishing, Library and information science, Open access, Open science
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6QP1X
    Abstract:
    Open access has changed. At the beginning of the millennium, it was portrayed in a romanticizing way and was embedded in a conceptual ensemble of participation, democratization, digital commons and equality. Nowadays, open access seems to be exclusive: to the extent that commercial players have discovered it as a business model and article fees have become a defining feature of gold open access, open access has increasingly transformed into a distinguishing feature and an exclusive element. Scientists are beginning to make the choice of a university or research institution as an employer based on whether or not they can afford to cover the article fees for publications in high-impact but high-priced journals. Surprisingly, this transformation of open access is not the subject of any noteworthy discussion in specialist or journalistic publications, but instead the ideals of the digital commons of knowledge still prevail in these venues. Even so open access is increasingly becoming an instrument that creates exclusivity, exclusion, distinction and prestige. These functions, however, are obscured by symbolic gift giving strategies and presented as altruistically staged, so that in the discourse of the open access community and in media reporting on open access, the both euphemistic and largely obsolete prosocial story-telling of open access dominates. The paper also discusses the question of whether the concept of open access was not overstrained by the hopes placed in it.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.5281/zenodo.1206377
    Publisher:
    Litwin Books, Sacramento
    Pub. Date:
    2018-04-01
    Book Title:
    Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access
    Author/Editor:
    Schöpfel, Joachim; Herb, Ulrich
    Page Range:
    69 - 81
    ISBN:
    978-1-63400-029-1
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial
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