On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Michael Lean wrote: > This Week On ABC Radio National's investigative documentary > program, Background Briefing > ......................................... > Sunday August 12th 9am > Tuesday August 14th 7pm > Wednesday August 15th 4am > ......................................................... > Knowledge Indignation: Road Rage > on the Information Superhighway > Produced by Stan Correy
I'm not sure whether or not the following quote is an excerpt from the above programme: > On the eighth day God created the Internet so that eventually everyone > would know everything. But mankind didn't want to share, and created > new technologies to control the miracle of the Internet, and knowledge > became a commodity. It is so disheartening to have to point out the fallacies in the thinking of kindred spirits, but if the above quote is indeed an excerpt from the above programme then it must alas be stated that it is not only utter nonsense, but, for that reason, it is likely to retard rather than hasten the freeing of what can and should be free on the Internet -- which is most decidedly NOT everything! In general, human beings do what they do, produce what they produce, create what they create, in the hope and expectation of getting fairly rewarded for it. Otherwise, it is not worth the time and effort. I simplify, but I think this is the general rule. There are exceptions, where humans take the time and effort to produce things in order to give them away (or where giving them away is an indirect way of gaining some other reward). But those are exactly that: EXCEPTIONS. It does not matter whether the commodity is pork-bellies or "information": we are not in general motivated to produce it as a give-away. I repeat. There are exceptions. And the refereed research literature is one of those exceptions. But to conflate this with the countless books, papers, and other chunks of "knowledge" that their authors are NOT interested in giving away for free is simply woolly thinking, and does (in my opinion) considerable harm to the cause of those who championing only the giving away of the give-ways. Let us take a step back. What is wrong with the following statement? "On the SEVENTH day God created the PRINTING PRESS so that eventually everyone would know everything. But mankind didn't want to share, and created new technologies to control the miracle of the PRINTED PAGE, and knowledge became a commodity." The ONLY relevant thing that has changed, from the Gutenberg Era to The PostGutenberg Era, is that there is now (1) a new way to produce and sell (sic) NON-GIVE-AWAY "knowledge" AND (2) a new way to produce and give away GIVE-AWAY knowledge. This much more realistic construal of the "miracle" is a far cry from the "Knowledge Liberation Movement," which is as incoherent, and hence as quixotic, as the movement to free all products, be they knowledge or otherwise, digital or analog. Please, let's be sensible! It will not hasten the day when give-aways can be freely given away on the Net to make common cause with the absurdity that everything digital should be free, and only analog products paid for! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1 > Scientists are the first to rebel, and 26 000 have signed a petition. > After the first of September they'll refuse to cooperate > unless scientific knowledge is set free. "Refuse to cooperate"? What does that mean? They have signed a petition that refereed journal publishers should give away their contents online for free. They have also threatened (and some [not all] may actually carry out the threat) not to publish in journals that do not comply. One can only wish them every success. (I myself have signed the petition.) But what is their probability of success, and, even more important, what is its likely timetable? There are currently 20,000+ refereed journals, publishing 2,000,000+ refereed articles annually. How many of those authors (or even of the biomedical subset, which is at least an order of magnitude greater than 26,000) have signed that petition, sincerely plan to stop submitting their papers to journals that do not comply, and have suitable alternative journals to submit them to instead? And is it a reasonable thing to ask of refereed journal publishers, today, that they immediately give away their contents for free online? More important, is it a reasonable thing to expect authors to give up their established journals immediately just because they decline to give away their contents for free online, equally immediately? Or is this meant to be a long, drawn-out process, freeing the refereed research literature in a decade or two? (But is that not likely to happen anyway?) It seems to me that if we bring things more into focus, stop naively conflating the give-away and non-give-away literature in one "Knowledge-Lib" slogan, and address our appeal to free their give-away goods to the PRODUCERS of those works, namely, the authors of the refereed journal articles, rather than to the publishers of the journals, then there might be some hope of hastening the optimal and inevitable, instead of delaying it still further. The way to free the researchers' give-away refereed research is for them give it away themselves, immediately, by self-archiving it in their institutional Eprint Archives, not by signing petitions enjoining their publishers to do it for them, and then waiting and hoping for the results: http://www.eprints.org Harnad, S. (2001) Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Ariadne 28 June 2001. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/#1 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/ariadne.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu 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 NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org