“Information wants to be free,” declares Stewart Brand, one of the prophets of Infotopia, a concept advocating the Internet-based potential to pool information and to use that knowledge to improve our lives.He walked the talk, too, by publishing the Whole Earth Catalog. But the real question is: “Do people want information to be free?”
According to a recent Scientific Americanarticle, numerous graduate students in various fields of science are participating in a wiki project called “OpenWetWare” and in several science sharing blogs. Some students report that this has helped them advance their understanding of difficult points in their fields of specialty.
However, while giving graduate students an easy way to share insights and experiences, there are some negative views about accessing their research on the Internet. First, the research is not a product of real science -- that is, carefully thought through papers that are closely scrutinized by peer review prior to publishing.
Also, graduate students hesitate to say anything critical of work done by the professionals, lest it come back to haunt them when they are applying for grants or jobs.In addition, there is a fear that a trusting researcher might publish the questions he or she has developed after years of effort, only to have some reader take the creative leap to a solution and capture all the credit, not to mention profit.
Speaking of profit -- that is the main reason scientific journals are not rushing to participate in what Infotopians call “the gift economy.” According to the science journalist, Spencer Reiss, roughly 95 percent of peer reviewed research papers in the life sciences are still locked up by the big commercial publishers, such as Elsevier and Springer. For them, scientific publishing is a $10 billion global business, growing 10 percent a year. Reiss comments that these folks are unlikely to give up their golden egg-laying goose without a fight.
Fight indeed! In 2006 a bill entitled The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was introduced in the Senate that, if passed, would encourage the publication of federally funded scientific research in open access (OA) journals, which are free to the public. To strengthen opposition to the bill, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the chief lobbying organization for American publishing interests, hired former congresswoman Patricia Schroeder as its president. Apparently, she did her job well. The bill died in committee that year. An earlier bill in the House met the same fate.
After its victory in the Senate, AAP beefed up its lobbying team by hiring the infamous Washington insider, Eric Dezenhall. Business Week deems him “The Pit Bull of Public Relations.” His strategy is to keep OA proponents on the defensive with messages like: Public access equals Socialism; OA would dampen the profit motive for research; and it could result in government censorship by agencies being denied funds to possibly controversial research. He, too, seems to be doing his job well. According to pro-OA Taxpayeraccess.org, the FRPAA has not been reintroduced in Congress.
Publishers aren’t the only special interest opposing OA.Pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies take out patents on drugs and farm technology that were discovered by publicly funded university research, as well as research funded by federal agencies. Allowing a bill like FRPAA to pass would collapse their profit-making structure as OA on the Internet would become unstoppable.
So, maybe “information wants to be free,” as Stewart Brand says, but there are very powerful people who want to keep it corralled. In today’s economic and political reality, comparatively inconsequential research can run as free as it pleases, but where there is real money to be made, the rule of “charge what the market will bear” will continue its reign for the foreseeable future.
Will somebody stop the free flow of information over the Internet? I shudder when I consider what Google does in China. They, not the government, filter out references to information the government doesn't want people to share.
Post 911, could that happen in what used to be the free world?
I read somewhere in doing my research that the idea of using the date of publication on an Internet discussion list as proof of authorship for copyright protection has not yet been tested in court. It does not seem as reliable a record as mailing a copy to the Library of Congress, which is what used to be done.
Yes, OA journals with a wide readership have big expenses even though distribution over the Internet is practically free. They need full time staff, office space, and have operating expenses. One of the biggest OA journals, PLoS Biology, lost nearly $1,000,000 over the last couple of years. Without foundation grants, they would fail. George Soros has contributed millions to the OA movement. The Moore Foundation gave PLoS $9,000,000.
Financing successful OA journals is a major problem. Ironically, volunteers can run small subscription OA journals for free, but if they become widely read, costs of operation threaten to close them down.
I agree that the profit motive is a huge moving force for many science researchers. But there are plenty of examples of folks who do research for higher reasons. Look at the Human Genome Project, for instance. They put all their information online from the beginning.
Some researchers love to solve problems, some want to make a contribution to humanity. I think that most scholars publish just to be a part of the intellectual community, and with no expectation of profit at all.
I hope the OA institutional repository movement can contribute to the weakening of the grip that big publishers have over science articles. But journals draw peer reviewers from a variety of institutions. If OA science becomes dependent on institutions, what will happen to peer review?
I think that OA journals are the best way to go. But how can they be financed? Some of them now charge the author $3000 or more to cover costs of publication. That bars poor scientists from making their thoughts and findings known.
We are in a transitionary period, but the momentum has begun.
I like your expanded definition of science. But I'm not guilty of trivializing all sharing on the Internet. I think much more of that should be done in the science community.
However, somebody has to point out that there are Great Powers resisting the dream.
I think its a bold move. But I wonder if there aren't some problems that may prompt a legal challenge. For example, the Provost'sOffice has control over which articles get published in the OA repository. Will this put unwanted pressure on scholars to avoid saying anything to offend that office?
I think this is all an act of desperation seeing that there once revered 'money empire' is crumbling!! It's really annoying to learn about the tremendous financial strains put on university libaries as they struggle to cope with ever increasing subscription fees. Another sad part is that most of these researches are publicly funded and yet some publishing guys out there still have the audacity to deprive the very public access to these research materials.
Look at what we stand to gain if OA bcomes the other of the day:
What we really need is DRM for text -- a place to publish ideas and establish primacy.
So far, I think that Usenet (nntp) excels in that regard far beyond the web. It gives a very ordered set of categorization to knowlege, it distributes the knowledge widely and it has a permanence across decades. Some of you may know of Usenet as "Google Groups" -- but don't be fooled. A real newsreader that makes full use of nntp is a tool beyond belief for discussion and information.
Essentially, wide distribution with an agreed upon timestamp is really all you should need to establish ownership of an idea or creative material. Those who then copy or reuse, should be subject to the current laws regarding that, and may participate in a marketplace for acquiring, or distributing, or reworking original ideas.
This is becoming more and more common where a private
organization makes profit based off of the tax payer’s money.
Where is the return for the citizens of this country?As an example, there are no price discounts
for many of the pharmaceutical drugs that came about from research funded by
tax payers.
Too many revolving
door politicians such as Patricia Schroder and numerous lobbyists are
swinging the pendulum in favor of corporations over citizens.
The Internet has destabilized many business models that were
successful from the past rendering them obsolete.
It will be interesting to see if the Internet can destabilize
the concentration of powers at the economic and political level for nations
around the world.
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When Democratic presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton recently issued a debate challenge to her Democratic rival Senator Barack Obama, she urged him to face off with her in a debate without a moderator, Lincoln-Douglas style. He refused, saying he already debated Clinton 21 times, "the most in primary history." But Clinton may be on to something. With the help of electronic campaigning and Internet voting, here is my suggestion for the right way to use debates to choose a President.
The Internet is causing a titanic change in the power structure of presidential campaign fund raising. In the old model, a few power brokers stimulated the early contributions their guys needed to become viable primary candidates.But the balance of power is shifting. The Internet’s emerging semiotic democracy is empowering grassroots contributors, giving them a greater level of participation and influence in the political process.
In a recent New York Timescolumn, commentator Katharine Q. Seelye invited her readers to share opinions about whether Internet voting could be used to bail out Florida and Michigan, the only states that were excluded from the Democratic presidential primary election process. The good news is that more people are starting to think about Internet voting as a real possibility for the U.S. The bad news is that this is not the time to use Internet voting to quickly save the two miscreants from their punishment.
Everyone can see it coming. One day, all voting for the President and Vice President of the U.S. will be done over the Internet. Of course, the prospects of such a major change in election technology can stir up a range of feelings, from the anticipatory excitement of the adventurer to the dread of doomsday in the naysayers. For my part, there is really very little to fear, and very much to anticipate with relish.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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