Open Access and its consequences

This post at the Scholarly Kitchen touches on a number of arguments against mandatory CC-BY licensing.  They’re all worth talking about, although none seem worth keeping science behind closed doors.

I found one of the arguments to be very familiar:

Are the funding agency’s gains from the CC-BY license worth paying an additional $500 per paper that could instead be used to fund further research? Is providing free raw material for a company in San Francisco or Bangalore really a good investment for the UK government’s research funds?

It’s a fair point: when you make data free for everyone, that means people may do something with it you may not like.  Such as perpetuating oppression:

A very interesting and well-documented example of this empowering of the empowered can be found in the work of Solly Benjamin and his colleagues looking at the impact of the digitization of land records in Bangalore. Their findings were that newly available access to land ownership and title information in Bangalore was primarily being put to use by middle and upper income people and by corporations to gain ownership of land from the marginalized and the poor. The newly digitized and openly accessible data allowed the well to do to take the information provided and use that as the basis for instructions to land surveyors and lawyers and others to challenge titles, exploit gaps in title, take advantage of mistakes in documentation, identify opportunities and targets for bribery, among others.

Inasmuch as the ability to process and use data is a privilege of the educated and the wealthy, the free-for-all release of information can and probably will disproportionately help those who need it least.  Again, this doesn’t keep me from supporting open access.  But it makes me mindful that simply releasing information is not enough.