A thought-provoking review appeared in the October 13 2006 issue of the Times Literary Supplement:

Privileged information has been leaking into the public domain since the Reformation. During the 1530s, in England, records that for centuries been restricted legal and religious texts were transformed into historical documents… [T]hey were picked up by… the antiquarian, who used them to furnish royal and university libraries. Gradually they were catalogued… then circulated around…. During the twentieth century many began to appear in translation, and during the twenty-first it is likely that all will appear online. As this happens across the Continent, real dissemination will have been achieved; the core of Europe’s early heritage will finally have become available to its citizens. (Web Works, by Alex Burghart, p. 16)

The “Long Tail” within libraries is r-e-a-l-l-y long. Burghart recounts the story of a post-doctoral student who left a 20-pound note in the front of his thesis (everyone has to submit a copy of their thesis to the university, which binds it and relegates it to eternal obscurity in their library). He “checked every five years to see whether it had gone. Four checks down and the note remains.” Someone looking at a thesis in a library is a rare event of almost black swan proportions.

But while a dull thesis might be worthy of obscurity, primary records held in libraries have been even harder to get to than the scribblings of PhD wannabees. The web, and government- and university-sponsored digitization projects (not to mention Google), are changing that.

Where does progressive Web publication lead? Perhaps as far as the death of the academic book…. As most academics are foolish enough rarely to write for money, they would do well to start publishing their work for free on university maintained websites rather than in expensive editions limited to miniscule print runs.

Personally I look forward to the day when Elsevier and Blackwells are staring bankruptcy in the face after years of withholding information from the wider world. The parallels with the music industry and file sharing are striking, except that no-one is crying about the poor artists, because academics have never been paid anything at all — in fact, they often have to pay!

Burghart’s review doesn’t mention open-access journals, but his point about quality control touches on that movement:

Academic institutions must now become the quality controllers of the information superhighway. The can do this by publishing the work of scholars they respect on their servers and encouraging independent mines of information to seek their accredited approval. This will never be a guarantee of absolute quality [but neither is peer-review, see this week's NY Times magazine article about fake science]… but it would at least give surfers some guide to veracity and suitability, not unlike relying on your doctor to recommend drugs.

The idea has merit because the quality of information on the web isn’t great (not bad, but not great).

The Net is the greatest source of misinformation the world has ever known; if you receive unfettered access to all understanding, bonkers or no, then you become ill-informed rather than uninformed. We all crib ‘facts’ from the Web without checking them… Undergraduates often sulk and look confused when told that not everything on Wikipedia is right. I have heard a first-year protest, “but the Internet is a primary source!”

Some prejudices die hard, though. Burghart doesn’t mention the other great benefit of disseminating academic research — that just possibly one of us plebes might provide some feedback or (gasp) corrections to academics’ ex cathedra proclamations.

Tags: times literary supplement, alex burghart, blackwells, elsevier, open-access journals, university libraries, wikipedia, about time

Posted by Antony in: General, Media + Marketing, Search