The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the “Google model” for disseminating information.
Baum writes:
I did a Yahoo search on “information wants to be free.” The first hit returned was for Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia; according to it, the phrase was first pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984. Brand was quoted as saying: “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” …
[Brand] recognized the tension between the value of information and the ease with which it can be disseminated.
What makes information valuable? Brand’s notion has the user of the information defining value: “The right information in the right place just changes your life.” But why does a user of information find it valuable? Because the individual or institution that created it and disseminated it took great care to somehow imbue it with value. I’m being vague here because the value a user finds can come in many flavors. Beauty. Utility. Insight. Inspiration.
I don’t actually believe that information wants to be free. I don’t think information gives a damn. I think cheapskates want information to be free.
Brand was onto something, but he was missing something, too. The Internet disseminates information very, very cheaply, but it doesn’t create information. What the Internet disseminates varies wildly in quality. Those who create valuable information deserve to be compensated for it. I’m not sure the Google model can actually achieve that across the board, which is why I still think, at some level, it is inherently parasitic.
I can appreciate the tension between information being cheap to distribute and information requiring significant resources to create. (I am, after all, in an industry that creates both knowledge and educated people.) And I’ve said before, “If you’re producing something … that someone else is using to make money, you have a reasonable claim to share some of that money or to withdraw your permission to use the product of your labors.”
But I think the situation gets more complicated when we start talking about scientific information — especially scientific information produced with public monies.
When scientists create knowledge in the course of their research, do they deserve to be compensated for it? I think so — but that “compensation” may not be purely monetary. Part of the “pay-off” for scientists is the recognition they get within the scientific community for having made an important contribution to the shared body of knowledge. If you report an important finding, that finding will be cited by other scientists working on related problems. Having your results published and cited usually matters (a lot) from the point of view of getting and keeping a job (which provides you with a salary as well as the infrastructure you need to do further research) and getting grants (which provide the funds you need to do further research).
One of the ideals of the scientific endeavor is that scientists report their findings to other scientists. Otherwise, there’s no way to build a shared body of knowledge and coordinate the efforts of many scientists in the project of better understanding the various bits of the world.
The scientist funded entirely from private sources may have a reasonable claim against sharing her results. The secrets to building a better widget are proprietary knowledge; people who want to benefit from it can do so by purchasing our widgets. And not making the results public may be a crucial step to securing patent rights for our widget processes.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget that a patent grants the holder a limited-duration monopoly on the patented processes, after which those processes are available to anyone who wants to use them.
For the scientist working on the public’s dime, putting up barriers to public access to the knowledge you create is much harder to justify. Why would the public fund knowledge production unless there was some expectation that the knowledge would benefit the public? To the extent that scientists are inclined to view knowledge as valuable in itself and not just in its application to solving practical problems, what rationale can they offer for keeping that knowledge from being available to people (the tax-payers without whom you’d have to find your own money to do science) who are interested in seeing that knowledge? Can you really ask them for the funds and then withhold the goods they’ve funded?
I can imagine how well that stance will go over with taxpayers’ rights groups.
Clearly, there are costs associated in reporting findings, not just in doing the research that produces the findings. And those undertaking these costs should get to recoup them and be compensated for their efforts.
But do the costs of producing and distributing a scholarly scientific journal really rival those of actually doing the scientific research?
Maybe they do. Perhaps this is an argument that grants should be larger so that they scientists reporting their findings can offset some of the costs required to distribute the knowledge to the people who contributed funds to its production. On the other hand, perhaps this is an argument that the scholarly scientific journal is ready for a new model of production and distribution that deals with costs differently.
Indeed, to the extent that taxpayer funded scientists create valuable information, I haven’t heard of any of them getting rich by publishing in scholarly scientific journals (at least, they’re not getting fat checks from the journal). This raises the question of whether these journals — which rely on the scientists to produce the knowledge they distribute — are inherently parasitic.
The ever-brilliant Fake Steve Jobs pretty much explained Google’s business model, which is a lot less altruistic than you portray it:
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/11/mind-blowing-refrigerators.html
“Just remember one thing. Google’s basic goal in life is to drive the cost of everything in the world to zero — except the one thing Google sells, which is incredibly overpriced advertising with super high margins that are fed by Google’s refusal to share information with partners.”
Also, your comments brings up an obvious question–if taxpayers demand a share of any scientific knowledge they’re funding, do those same taxpayers demand a similar share of the other things they’re funding? Do taxpayers expect to share in the profits of a business bankrolled by a government small business loan? Should taxpayers expect a cut of the salary of someone who paid for college with a student loan? Are taxpayers getting a cut of the oil revenues reaped from our taxpayer-funded adventures in Iraq?
This is a pretty comprehensive takedown of Rudy Baum, but it’s not surprising because Baum is a pretty simplistic thinker.
I still can’t believe that he will even show his face after he’s been exposed for writing against Open Access when his bonuses are partly based on publishing profits. Does the American Chemical Society completely lack any kind of journalistic ethics? Does Rudy Baum have no shame?
Just a couple of years ago, Scripps Howard News Service severed ties with columnist Michael Fumento because he didn’t reveal his conflicts of interest with Monsanto. Maybe ACS needs to get in contact with Scripps Howard and learn something about journalism and integrity.
They are parasitic monopolizers. The service they provide is disseminating data to people who could use it as information. I like the distinction between data as information and data as trivia: Information is used to make a decision / change your life, data that doesn’t help resolve some uncertainty (like an article in a dusty, inaccessible journal) is trivia. Trivia might have a cost in money or effort, but it doesn’t help people make useful decisions–it isn’t information.
With the advances in the communication and searching technology, hiding the data in an expensive print archive or in an behind an inaccessible paywall trivializes the data. Maybe their business model once was the fastest and best way for disseminating data, but now there’s better ways to get the data out.
What is valuable is the information you use to make a decision, if some data sources are too expensive (in time or money) to use in your decision making, they are effectively trivia. Google & Wikipedia were demonstrably more valuable to Baum than whatever alternative journal Baum could potentially have used to gather his material for writing his article.
I think that Rudy Baum is also either missing something or deliberately bending things by conflating the creation of information (presumably by the scientists doing the research) and the publication of that information. I fail to see where the publisher does anything that actually creates information; the publisher is primarily a facilitator in distribution of information.
Traditionally, all scientific/academic papers were published in the journals of academic or professional societies; membership in the society (including paying its dues) gave you an automatic subscription to all publications of that society. Those publications were edited and peer reviewed on a pro bono basis by members of the society. *Discounted* subscriptions were provided for libraries, because they did not receive any other benefits of membership.
As time went on, there were more and more scientists producing more and more information in ever more specialized fields. At first, this led to the formation of more specialized societies, which produced journals for their special fields. This also led to a demand for scientific and technical news publications, which helped scientists stay aware of developments outside their particular fields.
In addition, the costs of publication and distribution increased, especially with the need to publish high quality photographs and other specialized images. At first, the societies turned to selling advertising, often for the equipment that made those images possible, to offset the increasing costs of publication while still making their journals available to members and the academic community at reasonable cost. Later on, many of the smaller societies turned to commercial publishers to relieve themselves of the costs of physical publication, with most still retaining editorial control. Meanwhile, there were more and more academic institutions, businesses, and public libraries that wanted subscriptions to more and more journals. This produced demand for ever increasing quantities of the published journals.
As universities graduated more and more scientists; more and more commercial enterprises became involved in scientific research; and public financing of ever costlier research became more prominent, demand for publication space for a vastly increased number of research publications made it potentially profitable for commercial publishers to create their own journals, news publications, and literature indexing services. Once some of these publishers took off, they were sought out by some of the smaller societies to relieve them of many of the costs of publication. Some other societies were actually bought out by private publishers.
In turn, some of these private publishers were subsidized under the table by businesses that wanted publications on their products published with little or no bias or editorial criticism as to their legitimacy — this was particularly true of the pharmaceutical industry. So long as someone paid them to publish something, it got published — “peer review” was little more than a rubber stamp. I suspect that that is still true of some commercially published journals. In some fields (medicine and electronic engineering particularly), the news publications are entirely subsidized by advertising and corporate underwriting, such that anyone working in those fields needs simply ask to receive a free subscription.
At the same time, the longstanding “publish or perish” standard of academia has evolved into “get funding or perish.” And, of course, most funding goes to those who have already published.
Meanwhile, we have also come into the computer and Internet age. It is much easier for a scientist or engineer to put together a publishable piece of research, complete with high quality illustrations, charts and graphs than ever before. This has simultaneously led to decreased cost of publication, with the sole exception of producing and distributing hard copies. Demand for speed of publication has increased, leading many journals to publish online — many on membership only sites. Larger and higher quality images are no problem for online publication. Both public and private literature indexing/searching services are available, many of them free for material that is published online. Some societies are even publishing material that they deem to be in the interest of the larger public as open access while other material remains behind firewalls.
Bottom line: the only thing that is keeping traditional publishers of scientific information going is the cost of hard copy publication. This hardly qualifies as “creating” information. It is now up to the traditional scientific and technical societies, through their members, to decide whether they actually want or need hard copies of current research. If they can use online materials, the need for the traditional paper journals and their associated expense evaporates. On top of that, it should only require modest subsidies to help societies publish publicly funded research online with free public access, including publicly funded server space for such articles. It would even be easy to attach a logo and statement of peer review for the various societies to such publicly published papers.
If the ACS decided it needed to maintain a news publication such as C&EN, it wouldn’t need Rudy Baum to shill for private publication rights for all ACS original research.
As it started out, let the members of societies themselves determine what research gets published and what audience it reaches. Profit motive alone should never stand in the way of access to information that scientists want available.
Except for my earliest publications, as a grad student working at a NASA institute, all my published scientific work is owned by Elsevier. As an entrepeneur in scientific instrumentation, paying for the research out of my company’s pocket, I can’t put my own papers up on my company’s web site, due to copyright restrictions. OK, I can do the preprints, but this has been a very sore point with me for decades. Information isn’t even free to the content providers, let alone the public. Viva, PLoS.
chezjake wrote: “If the ACS decided it needed to maintain a news publication such as C&EN, it wouldn’t need Rudy Baum to shill for private publication rights for all ACS original research.”
——
Baum isn’t shilling for private publications. He’s shilling for his own bonuses.
Those who create valuable information deserve to be compensated for it.
So ACS journals are planning to start paying authors and peer reviewers then? Excellent.
Also, your comments brings up an obvious question–if taxpayers demand a share of any scientific knowledge they’re funding, do those same taxpayers demand a similar share of the other things they’re funding?
For the most part I think they do.
Do taxpayers expect to share in the profits of a business bankrolled by a government small business loan?
Well, it is a loan, so it gets paid back from the profits.
Should taxpayers expect a cut of the salary of someone who paid for college with a student loan?
This one is less clear, but one could argue that student loans and grants do positively impact the taxpayers by keeping the country competitive.
Are taxpayers getting a cut of the oil revenues reaped from our taxpayer-funded adventures in Iraq?
No, but given that the majority of the country is against the war, presumably because it isn’t worth the cost in life, kind of makes this a moot point.
On the other hand, if you create useful information, there is no lock strong enough to hold it indefinitely. The reasons are basic and economic: the cost of disseminating information is nearly zero, and the consequences are irreversible. You can confiscate a stolen widget, but you can’t wipe someone’s memory.
If you want to keep information secret, you can come up with a myriad attempts to safeguard that information: confidentiality agreements, DRM software, 256-bit encryption, copyright laws, etc. But as long as that information is being used, you will find this a constant battle, one which is eventually lost. Lock a door, information will seep through the cracks. Put a wall in place, information will find a way around it. Clad the wall in iron, information will corrode it.
Why? Information wants to be free.