---
title: "Work in progress: 'Rage Against the Machine: The Politics of Open Access, Large Language Models, and the Reaction Against Open'"
layout: post
image: 
    feature: oa.png
doi: "https://doi.org/10.59348/8ey1q-hhx78"
archive: "https://wayback.archive-it.org/22123/20231101171300/https://eve.gd/2025/04/11/rage-against-the-machine-the-politics-of-open-access-large-language-models-and-the-reaction-against-open"
---
This morning, having been re-reading and thinking extensively about Moore, Samuel, ‘A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to Research’, _Revue Française Des Sciences de l’information et de La Communication_, no. 11 (2017), [https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220](https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220) but also the awful news in Tim Sherratt, ‘Update on Trove Data Access and My Suspended API Keys’, _Tim Sherratt – Sharing Recent Updates and Work-in-Progress_, 2025 [https://updates.timsherratt.org/2025/04/11/update-on-trove-data-access.html](https://updates.timsherratt.org/2025/04/11/update-on-trove-data-access.html), I completed work on a book chapter submission for Bas Groes that has occupied me for a couple of weeks now. The chapter is about digital social justice and open access.

Roughly speaking:

> For over two decades now, a select group of scientists and researchers have called for academic publishing to harness the digital abundance of the internet and the world wide web. This movement – dubbed "open access" – has called for the open and free availability and re-use of scholarly material. For the longest time, the key arguments for such access centred not only on the epistemic congruence of open practices with research itself, but also on the gross iniquities in scholarly communications on the global stage, fuelled by a voracious for-profit publishing industry that valued returns over scholarship. Meanwhile, governments expressed the more neoliberal view that business access to OA would fuel national economic growth and make academia serve industry, leading to a conflicted political history. In recent days, however, open-access scholarly material has served as the engine that powers the training of so-called AI large language models (LLMs). This has prompted outrage and kickback among substantial portions of the academic and creative community who seek a re-entrenchment of strong copyright principles to guard against AI systems; a rage against the machine. This chapter explores the contradictory motivations and methods of the OA movement and argues that LLMs were an easily foreseen consequence and extension of text and data mining practices. It closes with suggestions of ways to reconcile openness for humanity with the brave new world of artificial intelligence.

This is a reductive abstract, but the sum of the argument therein is that in the present moment, it looks as though “the OA movement” may fracture irredeemably (if it was ever coherent in the first place). In the US context, federal agencies, who had only recently introduced OA mandates, are being shut down by the Trump administration; it looks like the era of neoliberalism, with its tenuous support for OA, is over. Meanwhile, left-spectrum OA supporters have become increasingly vocal over the past decade about the insufficiency of OA as a goal. Certainly, many of such advocates see OA as a prerequisite to the endgame, but their actual desire is a re-formulated academy that returns to a set of ideals about the role of universities in society. But the binding pragmatism of achieving OA seems no longer shared by government, activists, libraries, and funders; and AI seems to be among the final straws. Whether, in the face of such political, technical, and rhetorical challenges, a route can be found to persuade researchers of the continued potential underlying social good of access to research remains to be seen. But, certainly, recent technical developments are rendering such arguments for digital social justice increasingly diffcult to make.

## References


* Kember, Sarah, ‘Opening Out from Open Access: Writing and Publishing in Response to Neoliberalism’, _Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology_, 2014 <http://adanewmedia.org/2014/04/issue4-kember/>

* Moore, Samuel, ‘A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to Research’, _Revue Française Des Sciences de l’information et de La Communication_, no. 11 (2017), [https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220](https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220)

* Sherratt, Tim, ‘Update on Trove Data Access and My Suspended API Keys’, _Tim Sherratt – Sharing Recent Updates and Work-in-Progress_, 2025 [https://updates.timsherratt.org/2025/04/11/update-on-trove-data-access.html](https://updates.timsherratt.org/2025/04/11/update-on-trove-data-access.html)