publishing @ 15 Feb 2008 03:30 pm by Tyler
The blogosphere is understandably gaga over Harvard’s recent decision to open its research to the world. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. As the NY Times reports,
On Tuesday the arts and sciences faculty voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that would commit Harvard to open access — the movement to speed the exchange of knowledge by freely distributing research on the Web.
[More coverage at Ars].
This is just one more step forward for the Open Access movement, which hopes to remove both “price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions)†to academic research in the sciences and humanities. The idea of knowledge as a public good is such a sea change for the current publishing world—but is it really such a pinko, far-out concept in an age of free distribution? It will be an interesting battle, and academic publishers seem unlikely to go down without an ugly, undignified fight.
The National Institute of Health and European Research Council [PDF] have made similar moves towards mandatory data sharing. And lest academics worry about the fate of their newly available work, see the PLoS One paper, “Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate.†For all the haters, forgive us our techno-utopian dreams. And read Lessig’s Free Culture (available here for free) for cogent arguments for broader copyright reform (torrent link).
On a related note, No Starch will be releasing some books this year under open licenses, including the GFDL and CC-based licenses. Perhaps most exciting on this list is How Wikipedia Works, an introduction to the world’s free encyclopedia, written by some of its finest contributors. The licensing is congruent to Wikipedia itself, hopefully making it both a useful resource for newcomers to Wikipedia, and to old hands looking for writing that can improve Wikipedia’s on-site documentation. There will be a free, online version, and a reasonably priced dead-tree version (natch).
As a habitual consumer of information from Wikipedia, I’m highly interested in the upcoming “How Wikipedia Works” title.
Cool! I’ll be sure to post a couple of sample chapters online with the author’s OK. Might be a little while, though.
It’s been over a year since that process started at Harvard, and it’s really rewarding to see the faculty agree on it in the end.
The Deans have also been making waves about freeing textbooks for university courses… http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/04/09/cut_costs_of_books_at_harvard_deans_urge/
SJ