Alec Conroy wrote:
On 12/21/08, Thomas Larsen wrote:
I doubt many receivers (of journals, etc.) would be able to understand them well enough. Academic papers aren't always easy to understand, especially for a non-expert, and they could be, God forbid, _misunderstood_.
My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large, we're not exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.
Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.
Thomas's position smacks of traditional elitism: Why inform the public when the public can't understand what you say? You can't expect informed consent for medical procedures if the public doesn't understand what the doctor is saying, so why say it in the first place?
It may be extremely difficult to understand technical articles that are available; it's absolutely impossible to understand them if they aren't available. At one time the dissemination of detailed technical information was difficult and necessarily expensive. Electronic means have made these difficulties and expenses trivial. We can now present the information to outlying individuals on the long tail of accessibility, without needing to identify who those outlying individuals might be. We can, at no extra cost, make the information available to those who have no use for it at all; making it available does not impose upon them the obligation of availing themselves.
Intellectual property law, at least as envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution, has become counterproductive. The means granted no longer "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," and in a manner unimaginable in the late 18th century. Rather, they impede that progress. Without free access we are condemning our contributors to enforced obsolescence.
- Service providers would, I think, be unwilling to catch on to this
idea, given the low image of Wikipedia in many areas of academia.
I'm skeptical the service providers will think much beyond whether its in their own self-interest (be that purely financial, charitable, or PR).
Yes. A threat to a competitor's own self-interests can be a great motivator to promote Wikipedia's low image. It's comparable to the oil industry's perception of global warming.
Ec