The Good Fight
Ruminations from the Ivory Tower.
A few weeks back, I got to ruminating on the question of why I bother taking the pode every couple of weeks. The short version, in case you lack the ability to click on a hyperlink, is that I write things because I want people to read them.
I have no illusions that anything I say here is particularly unique or earth-shattering. Oh sure, I amuse the hell out of myself, but in the era of the blog, there is too much content to go around already. This is why I’m not particularly concerned about monetizing this silly little hobby of mine. pintday.org is awash in a sea of mediocre content (theirs, of course. Our content is gold). If I tried to charge for my stuff, I could pretty much guarantee myself an audience of zero—a significant step down from our usual audience of two. Hello, mom.
I give this stuff away because I want to get my content out there—I want people to read it. I can’t make people like it, but if I can get my stuff in front of them, at least I might make them think a little. Occasionally, I many even prompt them to respond. And while this dialogue is a tiny little splash in the large pond of the Computer Internet, it is a splash nonetheless. My voice has been heard. I know it’s true—I got the fax.
It’s a little reassuring, then that no sooner do I arrive into my new vocation (Academia), when I discover that the very same fight is going on in the hallowed halls of our ivory towers—they call it open access. It seems that the traditional avenues of publication—the so-called scholarly journals—are no longer meeting the needs of those published within. It seems most journals require the author to hand over their copyright. In many cases, the authors aren’t even allowed to post a copy of their work on their own web site. Peer review or not, locking information away in an ivory tower so expensive that even University Libraries are starting to turn you away is no way to get noticed when information is increasingly available for free. And really, your research means nothing if nobody reads it. Remember books? Neither do the latest crop of undergrads. If Google doesn’t know about it, it never happened.
So good on you, academia. Keep fighting the good fight. Write. Publish. Give away. But don’t forget to tell ‘em that the pd.o sent you. After all, we did it first. I saw it on the Computer Internet, so it must be true.
kj · PDDXXVI
September 25th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Right on! When you share information it comes back to you ten fold. A true open source world of information is the future. The more you share the more you learn, and the more other people share, the more we all learn.
I always hated knowledge hoarders, they limit their potential. That is why true geniuses like Paul Allen map the Mouse genome and then share the information with the whole world for free, because he knows that society will be better for it, and that his research will fuel ten times the research that he funded.