So, after class I had a few thoughts that I wasn't able to share, so I've taken the time to type it out and post it. Go ahead and let me know what you think!
Last semester, I wrote a paper about publishing (I posted the bibliography here) that is pertinent to what we were discussing in class today. First, a little history about publishing, which was probably one of the most significant things to come out of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Publishing grew naturally out of the printing industry. As the practice grew, there were ever more authors and ever more books, and printers simply didn't have time or resources to print them all. Publishers were essentially brokers, organizing sales from authors to printers, then from printers to book-sellers. They were mostly concerned with profits, which made them very unpopular with authors. That relationship is the foundation for the distrustful author-publisher relationship today.
Through the seventeenth century, publishers attached themselves to every printing press, until it became all but impossible for authors to print their ideas without the approval of publishers (which led to abuses by the publishers, without any doubt). Further giving the publishers control, lawmakers passed laws that were very publisher-friendly; the King of England at one point even gave letters of rights to publishing companies who had earned his favor (either through money or other services), giving them total monopoly over all publishing and printing in the country.
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| "We don't need your stinking money!" Actually, I think you do... |
Now, I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I agree that participation is good, and I approve of open source type movements, but I think it is still true that the best science and the biggest improvements and steps forward require money, and usually lots of it. Say what you will about the apparent greed of publishers, they kept the funds that the printers needed flowing in their direction. We can't give control over to any one entity, sure, but is there a point where it goes too far? If we make it so anyone can access anything, where will the funding come for future advancements?
Comments welcomed.
I think that the open access trends are driven by an important shift in modern systems: digital "printers" have low costs. Arxiv is a good example: not only can anyone access anything, anyone can produce anything. One of our conventional beliefs is that producing a work is inherently costly, therefore it needs funding. While this is certainly true for some things (Avatar? Dark Knight?), it is most certainly not true for the proof of the Poincare Conjecture by Grigori Perelman. "Funding for future advancements" is, in academia at least, very very rarely dependent on the cloistering and exploitation of previous developments.
ReplyDeleteWhat you say is true, and it's especially true in regards to digital content and most kinds of information, but there are still things that cost a lot of money to produce. One example that my Econ professor went back to time and time again was prescriptions: 'manufacturing' the drug costs little, but on average, developing a drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and years of effort. If companies who have the money to spend on *those* kinds of developments aren't allowed to profit from their new discoveries (through patents and exclusive rights to produce the drug, for a certain time), then they will stop producing them.
ReplyDeleteI think openness is a good ideal, but I'm not so sure that the old model doesn't still have some place, perhaps even in academia. (This is good! I like the discussion)