What Scientists Can Learn from the Penguin? Open Access and Open Source

Sir Isaac Newton himself emphasized that “if [he had] seen far, it [was] by standing on the shoulders of giants ” (Scotchmer (1991), p. 29), clearly stressing the cumulative character of research and innovation. Building upon and borrowing from the ideas of other researchers positively defines a prerequisite for scientific progress. Thus, access to academic works is crucial to achieve efficiency in resource allocation. However, predominant price discriminating practices of journal publishers raise concerns to this access issue. The copyright that enables publishers to engage in such price settings, meanwhile, seems not to be required to provide incentives for scientific research. All of this pushes forward a discussion on a possible shift towards the new upraising star in scholarly publishing in the digital age: Open Access. This asks: What would an economist say in regard to the open and closed doors for scholars to create incentives for scientific research? This work seeks to contribute to the recent discussion whether the copyright law creates incentives for scholars to contribute in the production process of academic works. In particular, an analogy between the open access regime in science and the open source movement in the software industry addresses the lessons to be learned for rethinking the traditional publishing model in science. Standing on the shoulders of the authors in the open source literature, conclusions to the role of open access in science are drawn. In the end, new ways of scholarly publishing are discussed, giving reasons for a change in law for academic works and providing with a promising avenue for further research