The dominant theory about the upraising of Open Science puts the society or governmental decision into the role of decision maker and the goal is to convince more scientists that Open Science is a great idea. So it is some sort of ideology and political movement to open up research and make the publications free to read to the world. The main reason why this plot is repeated is because it give to the stakeholders the illusion that they have everything under control. Which means, that a certain scientists can decide by himself or the political decision makers can give Open Access a higher priority or not.
A closer look onto the problem of Open Access will show, that it is not the result of a decision making process but the reason is located in technological development. The first open access server in the world was the arxiv repository. The simple reason why the project is up and running is because:
- the costs for a webserver a low in the internet age
- the existence of desktop computers and the LaTeX textprocessor is common for scientists
- if Arxiv hosts many thousands paper it is pretty easy to write more of the same content
These technical conditions have resulted into a successful prepreint server. Bascially spoken, the simple reason why Open Access was started is because the manuscripts are in the digital format available so it is easier to upload the document to a webserver.
Like all technological innovation like the car, the computer or the telephone the process was not managed and there was no higher instance who has to decided to introduce it, but if new techhology was working fine, it was adapted as quickly as possible.
It is interesting to observe the Open Access was started around the same time like the desktop computer. The first electronic scientific journals on CD-ROM were available at the same time the CD-ROM was invented, and desktop computer were there to create such content. This sounds a bit trivial but between the invention of desktop publishing and electronic publishing there is a causal relationship available.
To understand the Open Access movement we have to identify technology which supports the creation of academic papers. Potential key components are full text search engines, desktop publishing software, bibliographic databases, document formats like the Postscript and DVI standard, Unix workstations and a larger amount of people who have access to these thing. The resulting open access movement is some sort of logical consequence.
The situation has much in common with the interaction between a human and other tools, for example a hammer. If somebody has bought a hammer, he will search for situations in which he can use it. And if somebody has installed the LaTeX package on his workstaion, he will write a simple hello world academic paper next.