As academics, media producers, and authors: Who Owns Our Knowledge? I present two troubling scenarios. Each of these have happened in the past few decades and is a heady mix of hypocrisy and gross power imbalance.
Intellectual Property Rights!
2006: RIAA Persecutes people for downloading music.
2013: Aaron Schwartz is persecuted for downloading JSTOR articles, resulting in his suicide.
2025: Technology companies use intellectual property without author permissions to train Large Language Models (LLMs). Everyone celebrates tech company profit margins, and LLMs can drive some people to suicide.
Which of these things is not like the other? To be fair, the final example (in red text) is at the expense of legacy publishers and intellectual property laws. But that is the point. Intellectual property rights are enforced in ways that totally benefit the largest entity.
Open Access to the.....logical endpoint?
Once upon a time, people were excited about radical open access. Post a preprint, post-peer review, and eliminate the bias of prestige journals. Now, it is the prestigious journals that enjoy Gold (!!) open access (for an exorbitant fee).
Although there are a number of options outside of this paradigm (e.g. Green Open Access), the goals of the open access reform movement seem to have become obscured. More specifically, the transition from words and slogans to institutional normalization has not been smooth.
So is the highlighted scenario the logical endpoint for open access? Probably not, but more work is needed. Not the easy work, but the harder work of changing systems and institutions.
That is all.
Can these scenarios be stopped? This is up to us.
