This thesis takes the phenomenon of ‘open access’ as providing a lens to investigate how the 'developing world's' information needs and its need to be connected to the system of science are negotiated and constructed in the ‘open access’ debates, and how the strategies leading to these constructions reveal a number of interests and conflicts.

Significantly the coinage of the term ‘open access’ itself, which goes back to the 2001 meeting of the 'Budapest Open Access Initiative' (BOAI, 2001), took place in the context of a development project in the widest sense of the word. The BOAI was initiated and funded by the Soros Foundation's 'Open Society Institute', a charitable foundation set up by billionaire George Soros, which has as its prime areas of action and intervention a number of ‘developing countries’. Since then a variety of national and international organisations, charities, foundations, various funding bodies, and even governments have outlined policies, signed declarations, advanced mission statement or else got involved in the wider politics of scientific information, that can said to have one current focal point in ‘open access’. Thus, the aims pronounced in the numerous ‘open access’ petitions and mission statements and in the various 'information society' policy papers draw on discourses attempting to tie the need for ‘open access’ to a number of factors that construct it as an issue of moral and political concern, quite beyond the seemingly narrow scope of scholarly communication. By doing so, the 'developing world', its needs and its fate are constructed in particular and often also in conflicting ways.

It is the aim of this thesis to examine how this is achieved and by doing so to question some of the underlying reasons and consequences. Moreover, ‘open access’ provides an ideal forum to re-examine some of these notions, since it appears to tie heavily into long-established discourses, while at the same time it draws on and shapes current ideas about openness, networking and globalisation. Thus, ‘open access’ will be seen as providing a lens for certain aspects of several developments that are particularly relevant in contemporary society and which cannot be disconnected from their histories and contingencies. These are the expansion and distribution of science, the changed circumstances of communication on the Internet, status and conceptions of information, as well as the inequalities that define international relations, to a large degree still captured neatly in the highly charged notion of ‘development’. Of course, these are grand themes and it would be presumptuous to aim at achieving a comprehensive investigation, neither do I pretend that I am in any position to attempt such a project. However, in its debates and documents and in the language it draws on, the ‘open access’ movement brings these issues in close proximity to each other. Specifically, it ties into several discourses that contribute their pre-established meanings from other contexts and that are already bound up with strong agendas, most prominently science, development, and also the various ‘open movements’. These are brought together in the ‘open access’ debates and by disentangling them the issues they contain can be brought the fore. This allows also to establish more clearly how they interlink and act on each other and to which effect.