I’ve been doing some reading on the open movement trying to get to the root of what it’s about. (There is some crazy talk out there.) In the process I found an interesting discussion on this very topic, the root of it. It’s a blog posting entitled what is the open movement? The posting focuses around one of the general happiness drivers for humans beings, building things. The argument seems to address open-source and enabling humanity to improve tools for building things. However, if you consider content a tool for building better content then I guess the same argument holds for open-access.
By the way, I’ve started a del.icio.us tag for OpenMovement where you might find a lot of interesting links. The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is a really interesting page on open-access.
Original post “what is the open movement?” seems to have disappeared. You can access it here. http://web.archive.org/web/20100822034925/http://dosemagazine.blogsome.com/2006/03/23/what-is-the-open-movement/