In 1984, Jeff Stamps and I taught a course on networking for the first online executive education program. As Steve Teicher commented below, that course brought together interesting faculty, including, while we were teaching, the unusual thinker Stewart Brand. It's a sign of the years going by that when I recently gave a workshop to a group of people early in their careers none had heard of The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart's early masterpiece.
Stewart's remarks that day (he taught after we did) have stayed with me: "Information wants to be free," he said, an expression that I've heard others lay claim to over the years. He illustrated his assertion with evidence that people were using the technologies available at the time -- rudimentary email and Xerox machines -- to pass information around and no copyright rules were going to prevent people from doing so.
Here we are nearly a quarter-century later and these fires are burning hotter than ever. In the last week or so, three independent bloggers have each brought up the issue again, this time in regard to academic journals. Each takes a different tack but all are getting at the same thing: If information is really important, it wants to - and likely should - get out, which flies in the face of the economic realities of journal publishers. Take a look at these posts and see what you think.
- danah boyd says she's not writing for subscription-only academic journals any longer in "open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals."
- David Weinberger is down with the idea that Harvard faculty vote yes on a proposal "to deposit a copy of their articles in an open access Harvard repository even as they submit those articles to academic journals." He just wants it to go further: giving faculty points in their tenure hearings for doing so. See "Harvard to vote on open access proposal."
- And then there's "You Can Take Your $15 and ...!" over at Paul Levy's blog. He's calling for journals to release important articles with broad public policy implications: "When a respected medical journal issues a press release about a given article that has important public policy ramifications but does not make available the full text of the article, it is a bad thing." He got fed up after an important JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article was released and unless you have a subscription - or pony up $15 - it's not coming to a website near you.
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