When it comes to getting access to the latest scholarly articles, there’s a stark digital divide. Students and professors affiliated with most colleges have unlimited access to large collections of scholarship such as JSTOR and HeinOnline, because their institutions subscribe to site licenses. To everyone else, though, those and many other scholarly publications are locked, or can only be read by paying hefty per-article fees.
Peter Baldwin, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, calls it a “grotesque disparity,” one that many professors don’t even realize. After all, they’re spoiled by their easy access to scholarship, and they forget that as soon as their students graduate and leave campus, “you’re sort of expelled from the digital paradise of the university world into that bleak, non-accessible world.”
There is a longstanding call to make scholarship free to all, known as the open access movement. Baldwin argues that this time when AI and ChatGPT are reshaping information could be a turning point that speeds up the move to open up scholarship.
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