A public good is characterized by the fact that no one can be excluded from consuming it, and that consumption by one person does not diminish the possibilities of others to consume it. Knowledge is a public good, no one can be excluded from it. Yet when this knowledge takes the form of publications, exclusion becomes very much possible. It is obvious that the availability of print works is limited. If a book is in the possession of one person, access to that book is closed to others. If the book is owned by someone, they can permanently exclude others from accessing it.

The internet and digitization promised nothing less than to make published knowledge a public good as well. Once a work is digital and available online, anyone with an internet connection can access it, simultaneously and without restricting its usability for others. This factual opening, however, remains only a possibility, one that scholars must actively employ when disseminating their work. And so, more than twenty years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration (BOAI), reality looks quite different from what was then envisioned: barriers to access remain, and the costs of accessing publications continue to drain university library budgets. The “Open Access Revolution” (Suber 2012, p. 1) was supposed to make scholarly knowledge a public good through “free and unrestricted online availability”, but it seems that today little more has remained beyond a business model for private, international publishing companies.

Academic self-organization

The scholarly publishing system is expensive and generates dizzying profits for a few companies, while outsourcing a considerable share of the work to academia itself. Yet the structures appear more entrenched than ever. For many, it may even seem unimaginable that things could work differently than through commercial publishers – enterprises no longer truly anchored in science, surveilling researchers through data tracking, and positioning themselves as data brokers. We do not really know any other structure of academic publishing butmeasured against the nearly 400-year history of scholarly publishing, they are quite new, having emerged only after the Second World War.

In 1665, the first issue of the Journal des Sçavans was published in Paris to report on “ce qui se passe de nouveau dans la Republique des lettres”. It is considered the first precursor of the modern scholarly journal. Just two months later, the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions appeared in London, followed by the Giornale de Utterati di Roma in Italy in 1668 and the Miscellanea Curiosa in Schweinfurt in 1670 (Ornstein 1928, p. 202).

All of these journals were launched outside universities, which were institutionally sluggish and conservative in both scientific methods and content (Ornstein 1928, pp. 257 ff.). Rather, the first scholarly journals emerged from the efforts of private scholars or individuals associated with them, frequently within the sphere of scientific societies. These societies emerged in the 17th century as networks of private scholars and professors, as “unions of amateurs”, and played a decisive role in shaping – if not outright founding – modern science (Ornstein 1928, p. 68). Their members created forums where they pursued experimental science and exchanged ideas (Ornstein 1928, p. 177). A form of institutionalization was often conferred upon them through royal or imperial recognition and patronage (Ornstein 1928, pp. 169 ff.).

The first journals usually contained publications from various disciplines, but in the 19th century a process of specialization unfolded within academia, reflected in the founding of new societies and journals. Scholarly publishing remained largely the domain of scientific societies, though production and distribution were increasingly carried out by commercial or university presses. During this period, private publishers entered scholarly publishing more frequently, though the academic business remained scarcely profitable well into the 20th century (see Brock/Meadows 2010, pp. 101 ff.; cf. also Fyfe et al. 2022). This changed in the second half of the 20th century, spurred by the geopolitical competition of the postwar era.

From rocket science to price explosion

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite. Since the systemic rivalry between capitalism and communism was most visibly fought in the realm of space exploration, this event sent shockwaves: Sputnik 1 publicly called into question US technological superiority (see McDougall 1985, pp. 141 ff.). This defeat prompted massive US investments in science and education. The educational expansion of the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. and Europe was thus, among other things, a consequence of a systemic struggle also fought through universities and their libraries. For technological development, knowledge is indispensable, and that knowledge is found above all in scholarly publications.

In Federal Republic of Germany, between 1962 and 1984, the number of university libraries nearly doubled, the number of current journals tripled, and the total holdings in volumes more than quadrupled (Dugall 1994, p. 340). The number of researchers also grew, and with it the number of publications.

In this phase, disciplines specialized further, increasing demand for corresponding publications. Publishers created these offerings, especially by founding new journals, thereby filling existing gaps. Although scholars viewed commercial publishers with skepticism, they nevertheless made use of their offerings, contributing to their success (Brock/Meadows 2010, p. 193). With educational expansion as a political desideratum, sufficient public funds were available to finance the growth of education and publishing (cf. Rau 2004, p. 17). Publishers adapted their strategies to these new conditions and soon realized they could charge universities and their libraries higher prices for individual titles than they could charge individuals. The orientation toward an international market in an increasingly internationalized science, as well as the systematic acquisition of publications and presses by certain companies, further fueled the growth of commercial scholarly publishing (see Brock/Meadows 2010, p. 219; Fyfe et al. 2017, p. 9). With Open Access, publishers then established a business model in which they receive money for each individual publication in the form of Article Processing Charges (see Pampel 2021, p. 8). In this way, politics, science, and libraries created and nourished for decades a monster they now seem unable to rid themselves of.

Some consider the “Open Access Revolution” to have failed. Many revolutions are followed by a phase of restoration, and the “Open Access Revolution” seems to fall into this pattern. But perhaps it is just that, a phase, after allOpen Access has fundamentally called the existing system into question. The new keyword is Diamond Open Access. At minimum, this means fee-free Open Access, but it tends toward non-commercial publishing as well. The Open Access community is currently wrestling with its definition, determined not to fall into the same trap again by ceding interpretive authority to publishers. Alongside the oligopolistic structures of scholarly publishing, there also exist science-led, non-commercial initiatives: independent journals, presses, and platforms, often sustained by committed scholars. Their financing is precarious, their structures often deliberately informal. Fee-based publishing is sometimes a necessity for such initiatives, not to generate profit but to cover costs. Diamond Open Access is thus meant to deliver what Open Access promised twenty years ago: free, unrestricted online access to scientific knowledge, independent of profit-oriented publishing enterprises.

Who owns science?

For the past twenty years, academia has not succeeded on a large scale in reclaiming what it creates, despite the efforts of academic libraries. But one may ask whether universities are truly actors of disruption, and whether they even could be. They serve science, which within the existing framework is hardly compatible with breaking with the system. Medieval universities surely looked very different from today’s, but they, too, could not free themselves from their dogmas. The revolution took place outside university walls, and perhaps this is what must happen again today. Emerging from science, of course, perhaps with the dedication of individuals who may not be scholars but who are committed to scientific ideals, and free from the path dependencies and constraints that inherently bind institutions, especially public institutions.

Science extends to its institutions, particularly universities and their libraries. These institutions provide the fundamental structures necessary to “make free scholarly activity possible in the first place” (cf. only German Federal Consitutional Court, – 1 BvR 424/71 and 325/72 –, para. 134). They act within a given framework, but they also find room to manoeuvre within it, which affords them and researchers certain freedoms and creative powers.

Open Access has always revolved around the question of how science can reclaim what it creates. Researchers and their institutions primarily direct this question at themselves. We posed it to them, and you can read their answers in the blog symposium we are launching with this text. The symposium is part of our project “Acquisition Logic as a Diamond Open Access Obstacle” (ELADOAH), funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space. For the past two years, we have been working on it jointly with the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and as this year comes to an end, so does the project. At its close, the authors of this blog symposium paint a multifaceted picture, exploring freedoms and limits, untapped potentials and systemic constraints.

The question of who owns science is far from settled, and perhaps it is not possible or necessary to answer it definitively. However, just as science can only ever approximate truth, so do we, with this blog symposium, seek to approximate an answer to that question.

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