John Ewing article in CHE

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

John Ewing's piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education is, in my opinion,
excellent, but I would like to quibble with one important section, quoted
here:

"By the time people realized that electronic journals did have costs --
editing, hardware, and software, for example, are not free -- what had
been considered a side benefit (open access) had become an ideology.
"Information must be free" was the slogan."

The slogan was not "information must be free" but (in Stewart Brand's
formulation, which is the earliest I am aware of) "information wants to be
free."  Sorry for the nit-picking, but the difference is that "should"
makes this into a moral imperative, whereas Brand's formulation implies
that information follows its own rules in a disinterested manner.  I am in
Brand's camp on this matter.  The point about Open Access that I would
make (and I am aware that there are many other points to be made about it)
is that is takes advantage of an inherent quality of the medium of digital
publishing in a networked environment.  This is not a matter of good or
bad any more than there are rights and wrongs to the wind.

What many OA advocates seem to want is all the trapping of hardcopy
publication (author attribution, pre-publication peer review, unchanging
archives, etc.--the trappings of the text as monument), but with the
convenience and alleged lower cost of Internet publishing.  It's more
likely, I think, that OA will in time look like other
made-for-the-Internet communications:  Friendster, ICQ, and the
blogosphere.  The first test of publishing anything is, What would McLuhan
say?

-- 
Joe Esposito