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

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.

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.

Introduction: Snatching the Good from the Jaws of the Best 1
1 Some Knowledge Wants to Be Free 13
2 The Variety of Authors and Their Content 39
3 The Open-Access Problem 59
4 Information on Wings: The History of Open Access 93
5 The Professoriate and Open Access 139
6 The Digital Disseminators 179
7 Alexandria in the Cloud: Promises and Pitfalls of Global Access 201
8 An Intellectual Aquifer: The Bulletin Board Goes Global 233
9 Finding What We Need: Searching and Filtering 253
10 Too Much Content? 281
Conclusion: Good Enough--Open Access Meets the Real World 307
Acknowledgments 325
Notes 327
Index 397