Nikos Koutras: Building Equitable Access to Knowledge Through Open Access Repositories
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Nikos Koutras: Building Equitable Access to Knowledge Through Open Access Repositories IGI Global, Hershey, Pennsylvania, 2020, 333 pp., $144.00, Hardcover, ISBN 9781799811312 Paul Arthur1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
It is remarkable to see how within two decades, technology has dramatically changed the way we communicate information, making research more freely available to the broader public, and in doing so giving rise to new opportunities and challenges for publishing. In Building Equitable Access to Knowledge Through Open Access Repositories, Koutras illustrates how the so-called knowledge revolution has bestowed huge problems for copyright laws and intellectual protection. Yet as he argues, commercial publishers and university libraries can co-exist by collaboratively supporting open access repositories that offer the widest possible access to knowledge promoting greater social inclusion for a more fair and just global society. Koutras uses a wide variety of frameworks—including legal, philosophical, historical, economic, and ethical—to convince the reader of the enormous benefits that can be achieved through free equitable access to knowledge. After a productive analysis of how our digital landscape can extend access to information, which in turn helps construct knowledge economies for future sustainability and the safeguarding of human rights, this book takes the reader through the history of copyright, to explain how open access can be considered an infringement on IP rights, working against commercial profits and public expenses, and discouraging investments in technology. But contrary to this environment, Koutras illustrates optimistically how we can balance open access with copyright to facilitate a more efficient and equitable economy, and one where principles of corporate social responsibility can be central to the creation, preservation and sharing of research data through digital resources. While writing Building Equitable Access to Knowledge Through Open Access Repositories, Koutras could not have anticipated COVID-19, but current events demonstrate the significant benefits as well as continuing drawbacks of moving to open access. The rapid development and testing of COVID-19 remedies have * Paul Arthur [email protected] 1
Edith Cowan University, 2 Bradford Street, Mount Lawley, WA 6050, Australia
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been disseminated through preprint open access and international data sharing. Longer term it will be necessary for further research to accompany, evaluate, and influence the ways in which governments and citizens adapt to the post-coronavirus world (for example, studies of the economic effects of extended lockdowns, or of the many other legal, environmental and political issues that have accompanied the pandemic). Society will have an even greater need for and reliance on open access as we share our observations and analyses more widely and rapidly than conventional publication mechanisms have te
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