Dear Peter, Your coverage of digital developments in Free Online Scholarship through your newsletter and Forum is remarkable and admirable.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm I just wanted to suggest that it might not be doing the cause of freeing digital access the most good to make no explicit distinction between consumer rip-offs of non-give-away products and producer give-aways of give-away products. It is a fact that there are some digital products (e.g., music recordings) that their producers definitely do NOT want to give away. So attempts to get them anyway, whether they are bending technology or bending the law or both are in fact going against the wishes of their producers. That is an ideological/ethical issue on which you need not take a stand if you do not wish to, but it needs to be classified as being what it is: consumer theft of digital products that are not producer give-aways. In stark contrast to this are those digital products (e.g. refereed research papers) that their producers (authors) definitely DO want to give away. (The publisher's "value-added" component to the product is another matter, and should perhaps be treated as a hybrid.) So throwing together napster-style piracy with eprint-self-archiving simply risks making more people (most of whom are in any case profoundly confused about ALL digital developments) think that there is something immoral or illegal about the latter. I would accordingly suggest formally subdividing your coverage into those developments that concern non-give-aways only, give-aways only, and perhaps a hybrid section for developments that may impinge on both. (For what it's worth, if I were myself covering Free Online Scholarship, I would only want to cover those aspects in which the "Free" is voluntary on the part of the Scholar, rather than forced on him by the user...) Best wishes, Stevan -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
