Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All

(Hardback)

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A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement- past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities. Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance. In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for "free" knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity's age-old ambitions. Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world. Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement.

Reviews

"For those already well-versed in the open access community, you know that there is an abundance of literature covering the theory, economics, and sociological dimensions of OA. But, its easy to lose the forest for the trees. Athena Unbound stands out by providing a comprehensive, high-level explanation of how we have reached the current state of open access affairs."
AuthorsAlliance.org

"A historian at UCLA and Global Professor at NYU probes the aim of open access (a visionary quest whose ultimate ambition is an absolute: All knowledge should be freely available to anyone anywhere) and the practical and other obstacles that hinder its realization. Important, at a time when institutions are creating ever more intellectual property of immense economic and social value. Practicing what he professes, his book is open access."
Harvard Magazine

"There is a longstanding call to make scholarship free to all, known asthe open access movement. Baldwin argues that this time when AI and ChatGPT are reshaping information could be a turning point that speeds up the move to open up scholarship. Baldwins latest book, Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All, looks at the history and future of the open access movement. And fittingly, his publisher made aversion of the book available free online."
EdSurge

"Baldwin (UCLA and NYU) describes the challenges of open access for humanities disciplines and also the possibilities for making scholarship open access. He points to Latin Americas success in making the transition to open access through government funding and the SciELO publishing network. He explores what it would take to digitize the public domain and out-of-print books and articles of the world. Baldwin is a professor of history, and his cross-disciplinary knowledge of scholarship in the humanities provides a perspective rarely seen in the literature on open access, a literature often dominated by scholars of the social sciences and so-called hard sciences. He omits insight into the market for scholarly literature that a professional librarian could provide. For example, in his calculations of the amount libraries spend annually on monographs, he uses an NCES one-time expenditures figure, which also includes serial back-files and audiovisual purchases, meaning he significantly overestimates the amount academic libraries spend on monographs. However, the book contributes a valuable humanist perspective to the existing understanding of the open-access ecosystem. Baldwin's polished prose marks him as a writer who cares about aesthetics as well as content in composition.Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals."
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Author Bio

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at UCLA, and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. His recent books are Command and Persuade- Crime, Law, and the State across History (MIT Press); Fighting the First Wave- Why the Coronavirus Was Tackled So Differently across the Globe; and The Copyright Wars- Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle. He serves on the boards of the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wikimedia Endowment, the Central European University, the Danish Institute of Advanced Studies, and as chair of the Board of the Center for Jewish History.