At the request of list members, I am republishing part of the exchange on IT Forum between myself and Larry Lipsitz, and absolutely great guy who publishes Educational Technology Magazine. I’ll leave it to you to guess which voice I am. :)
Now, let’s see if I am getting all of this thread right: Magazine publishers, book publishers, electronic services providers, software development outfits, and related corporate entities are engaged in a gigantic hold-up of teachers and learners,
In some cases, absolutely. Have you seen what Elsevier charges for a subscription lately? There is no better phrase than “giagantic holdup.”
But your first statement implies that I and others are anti-publisher. I am not. I do believe, however, that the following GRE style test item should be pondere by many people:
Ice delivery is to Refrigeration as Academic publishing is to ???
It is famously known that huge ice delivery corporations went out of existence because they didn’t understand what their core business was. They *thought* it was delivering ice. In reality, it was keeping things cold. In days of yore, publishing and distributing information was a capital intensive business. But it simply isn’t anymore. In my opinion, “publishers” need to understand that their value no longer comes from disseminating information. We can all do that ourselves (this list, our blogs, and print-on-demand services like lulu.com being examples). There is still value to add, however, in providing editorial services and facilitating peer review. I believe that “publishers” who think their value to the academic ecosystem comes mainly from the fact that they can get information to people (i.e., their value is in their ability to “publish”) have their eyes closed to refrigeration technology.
denying billions of people free access to – everything!
Whether good or bad, is is definitely true that people are denied free access.
The solution is simple: Eliminate all such corporate entities
We don’t want to eliminate them. We want them to evolve in response to what is happening technologically, and provide only the value we need. As per above, our community does not need help *disseminating* information. We need editorial services and peer review.
and empower “the community” to invent and produce all educational and informational materials,
This is already the state of things. Period. As researchers we: (1) come up with the ideas for our research, (2) find the funding for our research, (3) carry out our research, and (4) describe our research in artifacts we believe will be useful to others. In other words, we work hard to carry out research that willadd value to humanity. What value does the publishing industry add to our effort? It (1) facilitates somewhat objective peer review of our work, which is difficult for us to do ourselves, and therefore valuable, (2) provides editorial help with our writing, which is frequently painful / tedious / difficult for us to do, and therefore valuable, (3) disseminates our work, which we are now perfectly capable of doing ourselves, therefore adding no value, and (4) demanding that we who concocted, funded, carried out, and wrote up the research then hand over the rights to copy or share those artifacts to the publisher, which certainly adds no value whatsoever.
to be available without cost at all times and places to everyone.
This would be our goal, yes. I’m not sure we can ever reach this goal, but we can work hard at being asymptotal.
Nobody would ever make any money peddling information,
That is right. Because distributing information can be done by anyone - including my 8 year old who blogs his summer research projects. Distribution, or “peddling,” is no longer a problem we need help solving. We need other kinds of help, as per above.
which, as everyone knows, “deserves to be free.”
Not sure how to respond to this anthropomorphizing. =)
Of course, professors would still earn their salaries, as meager as they might be, and schools would still charge tuition (to be paid either by students or taxpayers), but that’s a different story,
Yes, people will still pay tuition. But they won’t pay tuition for information. Information is already freely available to them everywhere. The library (content vetted by “real” publishers), the Internet, MIT OpenCourseWare, etc. And why *is* MIT willing to give away all the content for all 2000 courses in their catalog - http://ocw.mit.edu/ ? Because they understand the information alone is of very little value. People don’t pay tuition to MIT in order to get professors’ books, watch their videos, or partake of other “publishable” information they produce. They can get that stuff elsewhere, for free, legally (libraries, etc.). People pay universities for (1) interactions and relationships with professors, (2) the chance to build social networks with other students, and (3) accredited degrees. Thus MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Rice, Tufts, Michigan, Utah State, and eventually all other schools will give away their content - because “peddling content” is not where the primary value in a formal education is. The value is in people and degrees.
having something or other to do with high-minded motivations,
Yes, having received multiple six figure offers from corporations, I know that I stay in academia for what might be described as “high-minded motivations,” as do most others I know. We could all make more money if we moved to the private sector. So, obviously, something else is motivating us.
and being totally opposite to the greed of those mean intellectual property holders, who, as noted, must be destroyed (totally destroyed!) if true educational opportunity is to exist.
They’re not mean per se. They simply seem to be more interested in holding on to their 19th century business model (distributing information is capital intensive and therefore where our key value lies - we own a press!) than in responding to the needs of the public. We don’t need help disseminating information anymore. We need other kinds of help. We don’t want them destroyed, we want them to reinvent themselves so they provide us the value we need.
Did I get all of this right? And where does one go to sign up for the revolution?
As a publisher, you could be a leader in the revolution. Provide us editorial services for a fee, no copyright strings attached. Provide us peer review services for a fee, no copyright strings attached. Believe it or not, we’ll pay for a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval”(TM!) that says “This artifact has been reviewed by objective experts in the field and passes muster.” Become the little logo placed on articles that let’s people know, “Oh. This should actually be a decent piece of writing.” Those are the types of services we need. You could provide them. We will pay for them. The Public Library of Science is doing this in other fields (http://www.plos.org/faq.html). Lead education in the same direction!