Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All by Peter Baldwin. MIT Press, 2023.
The biographical information for the author of Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All indicates that Peter Baldwin is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. It also mentions three other books that he has authored and roles he plays with other organizations, such as the New York Public Library and the American Council of Learned Societies. It is unclear why it does not mention that he is also a cofounder of the Arcadia Fund, a UK-based philanthropy that promotes open access to knowledge, among other priorities. As of this writing, the organization has devoted at least $200 million to that cause.
Baldwin observes that when it comes to debates on open access, a “vast quantity of work has billowed forth, professionalizing the field by making it a full-time job just to keep up.” Yet—in prose that is clear, engaging, and surprisingly entertaining, considering the potential dryness of the topic—he does a masterful job of walking the reader through the thickets of arguments for and against open access, as well as through a range of practical considerations that make the issue more complicated than nonspecialists might suppose.
Since Baldwin believes that open access is the future of academic publishing, the question becomes what kind of future that will be. Perhaps that is why his book seems to be less an effort to champion the cause of open access (though it is certainly that, too) and more about placing the movement in historical context and encouraging scholars and universities to embrace it and take a more active role in steering it.
Because the author assumes the eventual triumph of open access, Athena Unbound is better at providing historical perspective and information about the movement than at making a case for scholars in general, particularly for those in the humanities and social sciences, to take up its cause. Those seeking to become familiar with the open-access movement will be well served by starting with this book. However, it is probably less informative for those already familiar with the movement, and it seems unlikely to satisfy its critics, including scholars who retain what Baldwin views as excessively “romantic” connections to academic work.
The summary on the dust jacket of Athena Unbound aptly describes it as “an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement.” In an interview with the Open Access Books Network, Baldwin claims that one of the primary goals of his book is to convince uninformed and skeptical scholars, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, to reconsider their assumptions about and biases against publishing in open-access venues and to offer practical suggestions on how to encourage more open-access publishing.
Baldwin provides a great deal of information about efforts to make research more accessible, affordable, and equitable—which were the high ideals that inspired the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the widely endorsed outcome of an international meeting convened by the Open Society Institute in 2001. Readers will also learn more about different levels of open access (for example, using color codes such as gold, platinum, silver, and green) and get a detailed perspective on the obstacles to knowledge and information as they make their way from authors to readers or from producers to consumers.
Athena Unbound begins with a history of the desire for all knowledge to be gathered in one central location, recalling the effort to realize this dream at the ancient library in Alexandria, Egypt. Throughout the book Baldwin points out, among other problems, that any brick-and-mortar library located in one place has always been insufficient for the purpose of collecting every published work in every language. Even modern efforts with much more limited aims than storing all human knowledge—like the US Library of Congress—have found it impossible to attain their goals. Moreover, a central location is inconvenient for individual researchers not living nearby, and then there is the question of who should have access to which texts (if any), why, and under what circumstances. This is to say nothing of an institution’s vulnerability to attacks, which have taken place time and again in Alexandria.
Enter the internet and digitalization, which Baldwin regards as “a necessary but not sufficient” development for the cause of open access. Many of us recall the enthusiasm of the first online decades when there was the promise that all knowledge would be made available to anyone, anywhere, with access to the World Wide Web. In 2004, for example, Google Scholar promised to make digital copies of most, if not all, scholarly publications already on university library shelves and to provide access to newly published research. Baldwin notes that Google Scholar now has twenty-five million scanned books, which makes it second only to the Library of Congress, with thirty-nine million books. Unfortunately, as Baldwin discusses, such efforts have also been stymied by those of us he accuses of clinging to the romantic ideal of the individual writer seeking recognition—if not fame and fortune—and those who are wringing as much profit as possible from scholarly knowledge by enclosing it behind paywalls and limiting access to users who can afford to pay for subscriptions or who are affiliated with institutions that provide that access.
Baldwin laments that “we might anticipate that the professoriate would be in the battle’s vanguard, delighted by the prospect of being widely read. Alas, disappointment would be our lot.” He claims that many academics seem unaware of the brutal imbalance between those who have access to academic libraries and those who do not. His suggestion that academics themselves enjoy privileged access overlooks the reality that most academics do not work at institutions like NYU and UCLA, nor are they cofounders of multinational, multibillion-dollar philanthropies, such as Baldwin’s Arcadia Fund. Many of us work in institutions where the physical library occupies only a few rooms of a building that also contains administrative offices and class rooms. We may have gold access to a few databases but less than gold (for example, silver or green) to others—and no access whatsoever to still others. Some books and articles don’t show up in any of my library’s databases, even though the citation information is freely avail able through a basic search on any browser. We are reminded almost daily of the difference between the haves and the have-nots in the aca demic hierarchy.
Such disparities add urgency to Baldwin’s criticism of some faculty members: Why don’t those of us at institutions with less access to these databases, especially those of us who were once students at or worked in institutions with better access, unite with those even less fortunate than ourselves who do not have access to any database behind a subscription paywall? After all, we are often acutely aware of the access imbalances that exist within higher education, which grow more extreme as cash-strapped institutions try to keep up with expenses that seem to spin outward in every direction all at once.
In the chapter “The Professoriate and Open Access,” Baldwin suggests that we’re too preoccupied with our career ambitions, our dreams of fame and fortune, and our pursuit of prestige to spend much time worrying about whether our work is available to everyone. Our eyes are fixed horizontally or upward, not downward, leading us to lose sight of the noble goals of addressing audiences outside of our profession and working for the common good, which would include ensuring that all audiences have access to the sources we cite.
Baldwin accepts that the cost of producing and publishing research is one of the unmovable objects in the way of open access, even when it is published only in digital form. The producers of knowledge must pay, whether directly or indirectly, for readers to access that knowledge for free. Therefore, Baldwin encourages scholars with full-time jobs in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the institutions that employ them, to think of our scholarship as “work for hire.” By “work for hire,” he means that we should think of it as work that we’re already paid to do and abandon outdated, “romantic” notions of the individual scholar who gains knowledge and brings it down to the people, much as Prometheus brought fire from the gods. (The book’s title is an allusion to Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama that Percy Bysshe Shelley published in 1820. Baldwin swaps Athena, the goddess of wisdom, for Prometheus.) Restructuring how we view our connection to our published work and the professional incentives associated with it will, Baldwin argues, make it easier for us to share that work more broadly through open access.
In advocating for producers of knowledge to pay for its dissemination, Baldwin must still contend with the problem of article processing charges, or APCs. From 2012 to 2017, Jeffrey Beall maintained a blog that focused on how predatory publishers benefit when the producers of knowledge are required to pay to have their work published. This creates an incentive to publish as many books and articles by as many authors as possible, at the expense of quality. Beall argued that when disseminators like publishers, bookstores, and libraries must instead pay for content there is more of an incentive to protect the producers of knowledge from exploitation and to ensure the quality of the scholarship that is produced.
Athena Unbound was published in March 2023. In December of that year, independent journalist Richard Poydner, previously a champion of the BOAI’s goals, declared that the open-access movement had failed because top-down approaches to encourage or mandate open-access publication without tackling problems like APCs only improves accessibility and ignores the other two goals of affordability and equity. While the proposals in Athena Unbound set out to address the problems of affordability and equity, Poydner would probably say they do more to maintain the status quo than to upend or replace it. Considering Baldwin’s commitment to the open-access movement (and his involvement with the Acadia Fund), he would surely reject Poydner’s claim that the movement has failed. However, when he opens his introduction with Voltaire’s aphorism, “The best is the enemy of the good,” he probably has critics like Beall and disillusioned advocates-turned-critics like Poydner in mind. The book itself is an act of keeping faith while describing a movement that has changed a great deal since the signing of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
Mark S. James is associate professor of English at Molloy University and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.