In his latest monthly newsletter Peter Suber deviates from his normal summarising and instead indicates how the principles of John Stuart Mill apply to Open Access. This is a must read. As most of you know PeterS is a philosopher and here he puts this to great use. If anyone asks “what is the use of philosophy?” here is an excellent example. It’s practical – it’s utilitarian. Some snippets:
The thesis in a nutshell is that OA facilitates the testing and validation of knowledge claims. OA enhances the process by which science is self-correcting. OA improves the reliability of inquiry.
Science is fallible, but clearly that’s not what makes it special. Science is special because it’s self-correcting. It isn’t self-correcting because individual scientists acknowledge their mistakes, accept correction, and change their minds. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Science is self-correcting because scientists eventually correct the errors of other scientists, and find the evidence to persuade their colleagues to accept the correction, even if the new professional consensus takes more than a generation. In fact, it’s precisely because individuals find it difficult to correct themselves, or precisely because they benefit from the perspectives of others, that we should employ means of correction that harness public scrutiny and open access.
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Mill, _On Liberty_ (Hackett Pub. Co., 1978) at p. 19:
[T]he source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being…[is] that his errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience….The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand.
Mill at p. 20:
The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.
PeterS: Here’s a quick paraphrase: To err is human, but we can always correct our errors. We needn’t distrust human judgment just because it errs. But to trust human judgment, we must keep the means for correcting it “constantly at hand”. The most important means of correction is “a standing invitation to the whole world” to find defects in our theories. The only kind of certainty possible for human judgment is to face and survive that kind of public scrutiny.
PMR: There is no doubt that Open Access (and Open Data) increase the number of eyeballs and hence the chance or error-correction. In arguing against that the opponents of OA have to show that there is a greater good by being closed.
This is difficult to argue, though I imagine cases can be made. I think it would form a good basis for philosophy and economics classes.
But coherent arguments against Open Access simply are not being made. We’d welcome them.
But they will have to be of the same quality as Peter Suber’s writing to convince me. And that’s hard.
I hope to write more later on the utilitarian aspects of Open Data.