Law Commons^™

A Case Of Open Access, Rowan Cahill

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

I support ‘open access’, the enabling of unrestricted and free internet access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. Too much academic/scholarly writing is locked up behind the paywalls of multinational publishing empires, generating enormous profits from the unpaid, often publicly financed, labours of vassal scholars/academics. So too with scholarly books, confined as they are by small print runs and exorbitant ‘library copy/sale’ prices.

To my mind there is much in contemporary scholarly publishing practice that reminds me of the medieval library at the heart of Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980), hidden as it is in a labyrinth, accessible …