Public Access: For Socially Relevant Knowledge Production and a Democratic Cybersphere

In the “Information Age”, power is largely a function of accessibility to, and control over, information and communication (Castells 2000, 2009). The development of the Internet and associated technologies is the primary driver of this shift, forever changing how information is produced, consumed, and dispersed. At the same time, we commonly hear that “knowledge is power”, and that the Internet has the potential to democratize the knowledge production process, opening up the intellectual sphere to non-academic publics (Agger 2004; Agger 2006). Given the centrality of science in producing knowledge, we set out to analyze the economic, social, and political conditions which create and inhibit open dissemination and production of this information. In many ways, academics in the Information Age have greater opportunities to share their findings with those outside of the university than at any other time in history. Open Access (OA) is one way to share research with less well funded institutions and engage civil society and policy makers. Therefore a deeper explication of this new, more decentralized and democratic knowledge dissemination project is needed (Shiltz et al. 2005). The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities conceived of OA as: