On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Christopher D. Green wrote: > First, contrary to Stevan, I suspect that much of the third word will > indeed be left behind by the increasing computerization of the first > world. Although this may "drive demand" for electronics in the third > world (note, however, I suspect the third world has far more pressing > demands at present), it certainly won't provide the funds necessary to > satisfy that demand. I don't see any obvious solution to that problem, > however.
My main point was not about that, but about the fact that the 3rd world WITH ITS CURRENT LIMITED ONLINE ACCESS HARDWARE (i.e., without the hypothetical knock-on "drive demand" effects of freeing the research literature online) will be incomparably better off as soon as the research literature is freed online than it is now, when it has to rely on its even narrower foreign-currency-limited paper-based access to the refereed literature for its researchers. So one can be (1) agnostic about whether the "drive demand" will indeed suffice to redress the rest of the world's iniquities, yet (2) fully committed to freeing the research literature online now. [Chris agrees with the foregong, I know. The rest of his reply somewhat misinterprets Alan, who wasn't arguing for holding back the freeing of the online refereed literature until all iniquities are righted either; he was only arguing for combining the two agendas, and it was this to which I objected, for the self-archiving agenda (2) has face-validity and can be accomplished immediately (with the help of generic open archives <http://www.eprints.org/software.html> and the legal copyright proposed in this Forum by Professor Oppenheim), whereas righting the rest of the iniquities (2) will be an uphill battle, and perhaps a long one. No need to yoke the fate of (1) to (2) in any way, not even by coalescing their rationales: their rationales are different. (And some of the more radical notions of "knowledge democracy" are probably intrinsically unrealistic, human nature being what it is.)] -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
