Happy Anniversary Napster, and Thanks for Your Impact on Scholarly Communication

[Greg Tananbaum <gtananbaum@gmail.com>]

A piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle assesses the legacy of 
Napster on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of of its 
release.  The article makes the case that Napster defined the 
current Internet landscape by, among other things, creating the 
expectation of an "almost infinite library of online digital 
content" and a "frictionless, convenient way" to access that 
content.  It also, of course, upped the ante on copyright 
enforcement and spawned a generation that wouldn't walk down the 
block to the record store (or the library, for that matter) to 
search/browse/discover new materials.

While I am not arguing that Napster begat the current scholarly 
communication system, it surely has impacted it. 
Demographically, the high school student who fell in love with 
Napster in 1999 is now a graduate student, a postdoc, or maybe a 
junior faculty member.  The taste of a firehose worth of free 
content at an impressionable age surely imprinted this 
generation, at least to some degree, with a sense that the 
traditional mechanisms used to meter and restrict content were 
part of a system in eclipse.

I can't imagine Shawn Fanning (18 at the time - 18!) set out to 
change the way research gets from Point A to Point B, but Napster 
altered the consumer Internet landscape by scrambling users' 
sense of how content could be distributed.  The impact of these 
scrambled expectations is far-flung, reaching beyond iTunes and 
YouTube to touch even the scholarly communication space. A 
comment posted by a reader at the end of the article states, "It 
took Napster to make the record companies see that they weren't 
filling the consumer's needs."

Without turning this into another "Open Access: holy grail or 
devil's trident" debate, I wonder whether the past decade in the 
scholarly communication space is most notable for its 
reassessment of customer expectations.  The proliferation of 
repositories, free archives, professional networks, data hubs, 
and, yes, open access journals has in many ways created a 
"frictionless, convenient way" to access content.  Many of these 
initiatives have been grassroots (e.g., RePEc, PLoS, bepress) 
and/or upstart in nature.  The success of at least some of these 
ventures has pushed traditional publishing companies to take a 
different approach to the market's needs.  By changing our sense 
of what was possible in the sharing of information, Napster is at 
least partly responsible for our changing scholarly communication 
ecosystem.

So happy anniversary, Napster, and thanks for making our lives 
more interesting.

The full piece is here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/01/MNI917R8PB.DTL

Best, Greg

Greg Tananbaum
Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content, & Academia
(510) 295-7504
greg@scholarnext.com
http://www.scholarnext.com