Dad forwarded me this fascinating New York Times article on the future of intellectual property, as a concept. With Google, etc. rapidly scanning books into a searchable database, and more and more information becoming freely available to anyone with Internet access, does the model of paying authors into eternity for creation of ideas even make sense anymore? And even if it’s enforceable at least some of the time now, can we/should we continue to bother, as it seems that technological advances will make it less and less enforceable?
Now I’m torn. On one hand, I’m all for crediting creators, both intellectually and financially, for their work. On the other hand, I’m all for the exchange of ideas, and let’s face it; it’s unrealistic to operate on the assumption that on a global basis, people have equal access to ideas. There’s no way in Hell I ever would have finished my thesis without Google and the Web, so naturally I think the Web is a good thing in terms of equalizing access to information, and it was eternally frustrating to me while I was in the revision process to go back to a source I’d used for an earlier draft (mostly Russian Federation government statistics) and discover that it was now unavailable or on a subscription-only basis (usually at some ridiculous price, which one had to pay before even being able to evaluate whether the info was even what you were looking for). And I’ve given away my own creative work (including my thesis) for free on various occasions, but then I don’t live on the proceeds of my creative work (and a darn good thing that is!).
But I also think a large proportion of the evil in the world is a result of and/or is enabled by controlling public access to information, so anything that erases barriers to exchanging ideas is a Good Thing. So where is this going, and should we be happy that it’s going there?
Ideas may be free, but information isn’t. There’s a cost to gathering it, compiling/indexing it and archiving.
And while your site for Russian statistics might be expensive, it probably cost less than the red-eye to Moscow, so you benefitted from convenicence, as well.
If you don’t want to pay, who should?
A slew of extremely troubling recent events have demonstrated how ill-equipped the conventional system of peer review is in detecting scientific fraud, or even ensuring a minimal standard of excellence. To highlight the case of Hwang Woo-suk, it was intreped grad. students with a keen eye who were among the first to notice the suspicious appearance of some of his figures in the landmark Science paper, images later revealed to be different overlapping fields of a single ersatz human clone. Some have speculated that relatively simple graphics analysis software utilized by some “lesser” journals would have easily caught the counterfeit data. The reviewers sure as hell didn’t, and I, like virtually everyone else, swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. We’re drowning in data, yet we pay rather dearly to gulp it down anyway.
I have to wonder what all the money is getting us. Subscriptions to scientific journals aren’t cheap, and without considerable support from an employer or other subsidization, trying to keep up with the literature would be prohibitively expensive for individuals. Meanwhile, there are free online archives for preprints that have taken the physics world by storm. It would appear that at least some academics in that field regard the subscription and publication fees of traditional outlets to be so onerous, and so unjustified, given the apparent inability of referees to routinely catch even the most basic errors, that they simply don’t bother to publish many of their ideas in print journals at all. More and more it’s looking like the for-pay print media exists only to extract a fee for the dissemination of minimally-filtered information that could be more efficiently communicated online at minimal cost. Worse, there are more and more complaints of unpopular ideas being given insufficient consideration, leading to unfair suppression of sound concepts and data. Unfettered exposure to the entire community and mechanisms for submission of commentary via email or online discussion fora might replace journal referees entirely and do a better job.
I don’t know if such a scheme could work as well in other disciplines as it could in physics. Certainly there’s not been anywhere near the level of adoption outside what appears to be the community of theorists and phenomenologists in the physical sciences. “Peer review” in a respected journal is still the gold standard (to use a pricey metaphor), and I’m not convinced an anarchist approach to the distribution of purportedly factual information will protect us from theft and fraud. That said, our current pricey approach to intellectual property and content is clearly pretty far from perfect, and perhaps too costly, given what it can deliver. Reforming the system, or abandoning it, seems to be the $64 gazillion question.