Endless Knots

"Information wants to be free"

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.

1. 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."
2. 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."
3. 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.

Anything but Standard

For a long time after it ceased to publish, I continued to peruse the airport magazines stands (the ones near the gate where issues are free for the ride) looking for The Industry Standard. Its appearance a decade ago on the publishing scene was a grand marker of the dot-com era and its reappearance yesterday, albeit in a different, let's say, 21st-century format, with its focus on "prediction markets," offers an interesting twist.

We won't be able to pick up the magazine at the airport but we will be able to read it online, where in addition to good old tech reporting and opinion, it promises also to tap "The Wisdom of Crowds." James Surowiecki's book by that name points to a favorite topic of ours - that collective intelligence, group smarts, is/are  generally of a higher quality of discernment than any single individual can produce and that such thinking can probably predict what's coming up.

All of this means that "prediction markets" will be a prime feature of the new Standard. Readers can participate in online "bets" about what's going to fly and what's going to crash in the technology world. Don't worry - it's not really a bet and it's all legal, being virtual and all. Take a look and you'll see.

Watch for this news to whip around the blogs and take a look at Betsy Schiffman's piece in Wired.com's "It's Baaaaaack: The Industry Standard returns:"

The Industry Standard, the web 1.0 bible, launched a decade ago, in 1998. In two short years, the magazine set a publishing record for selling 7,558 advertising pages. At its peek, page count for the magazine grew as high as 300, but its business collapsed along with the dot-com bubble. IDG bought the its assets in bankruptcy court for roughly $1 million, and the brand has pretty much sat dormant ever since.

"We found that the brand had quite a bit of equity left," Butcher says. "People remembered what the brand stood for before. Still, there's obviously going to be a new generation of people who have no idea what it is."

Come with me, meet an editor

I had a period a few years ago when, on the train to or from New York, next to me was seated a writer. Always. I've posted here about my adventures meeting another writer time and again in the nut aisle at Whole Foods. (We met for coffee there earlier this week, a location she proposed in an email with the subject line, "chock full 'o nuts.")

A few very close to me say it's my fault, that I strike up these conversations, that these poor writers likely cherish their privacy and I'm barging in on their otherwise contemplative lives.

Explain this, then. Yesterday, coffee (though first I had green tea and then water) with Hal Richman, whom I've corresponded with over the years about collaboration, virtual teams, and the like. Hal was passing through on his way from Nova Scotia  to Indonesia and happened to be staying here in Newton, Mass. for a night.

We talked so long that we closed up one joint (don't get excited, closing time is 4 PM on Saturdays) and moved to a second coffee shop, across the street, although, again, no coffee was involved. (He had ice cream, this was when I drank the water.)

Yammer, yammer, we went, what about this connection, what about that...and off I was talking about the trend whereby medical institutions now also are literary publishers (Bellevue Hospital in NY, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, a few others). Bellevue also publishes books, I said, repeating what I'd read in the NY Times (not just on some unreliable blog).

At the next table were a mother and daughter (also eating ice cream). We smiled and I noticed that she had on a cool brown suede vest with no collar, nice buttons.

"Excuse me," she said almost in a whisper.

"I'm sorry for eavesdropping but Bellevue is publishing books?"

"Um, yes."

She must have seen the question about to come out of my mouth. "I publish a literary journal," said she, poet Jenny Barber, founder and editor of Salamander, now in its 15th year and housed at Suffolk University in Boston.