Angela Sutton, graduate student in History at Vanderbilt University, has written an interesting post about the open access movement's ramifications in academic history over at History Compass.

She writes that, while there are a number of professionals who remain skeptical, "Open Access provides an alternative competition to the existing model of academic information exchange, and in the capitalist age of information monopolies, it could be a very powerful thing indeed."

Given the writing I've done in this space about Google, you can probably guess that I generally agree.  But I wonder if we might see open access scholarship become re-capitalized along the lines of free newssources online--adspace, product placement, and the like.  (Though if that model doesn't work for the New York Times, is it likely to work for the University Press of Mississippi?)

But I'm also optimistic. I'm reminded of Robert Kohler's fantastic book, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. In it, he tells the story of the scientists who, in the first half of the twentieth century, made the fruitfly the standard tool fo studying genetics.  In describing what he calls the "moral economy" of the drosophila geneticists, he argues that the fruitfly became the standard not because it was well-suited for the job (though it was), but because the scientists who began to use it were uncommonly open, generous, and communicative.  Any lab could get a sample of their fly stock, sent through U.S. mail, if they requested it and promised to share results.  Ideally, at least, results were not secret, data were not jealously guarded but--like the tools themselves (the flies)--were shared collectively.  In this way, the Thomas Hunt Morgan's lab itself, and the network of labs he tied together using the fruitfly, became perhaps an early model of open-access information-sharing in the sciences. 

It didn't always work perfectly (and depended in part on various privileges of white masculinity), especially as the corporate university emerged at the tail end of the period Kohler examines. But in my mind at least, it creates some provocative images of material, intellectual, and informational networks constituted not by the pursuit of profit, or by the exigencies of the job market, but by solidarity, trust, and a mutual commitment to knowledge. 

As skeptical as I am of most digital utopianisms, it certainly a lovely idea, isn't it?