[Reader-list] Pay or free? Newspaper archives not ready for openWeb... yet

[Gurstein, Michael]

Geert and all,

I'm not sure how far I want to push this, but the academic situation
(which covers BTW all the OECD countries and not just the US with Europe
having perhaps the most to lose since the major academic publishers all
seem to be European) is rather more complicated than that.

Academics are certainly risk averse and are relatively well paid for
their outputs but a major shift in academic publishing away from the
current highly costly paper based monopolies will have significant
consequences by (probably) shifting matters of peer review away from
closed cabals to open (and much more democratic) collaborative
filtering/review systems.

To perhaps clarify my original point which I think is still valid, for
academics to publish in on-line Open Archive journals in the context of
academe has to a considerable degree and up to this point been the
equivalent of "giving it away for free" since it has been questionable
in most instances whether on-line publications would count as
peer-reviewed publications for the variety of Promotion and Tenure
Committees in Universities and the rapidly proliferating formal
government research funding processes equally based on formal
publications in "peer reviewed journals".  

All of which to mean that a junior academic publishing in an on-line
Open Archive journal would until very very recently (and still in many
universities and national research funding environments e.g. Australia)
be in the position where this wouldn't count towards tenure or towards
future research funding awards.

All of that seems to be changing at an incredible rate where
"publishing" in on-line (and Open Archive) journals is coming to be
accepted as equivalent to publishing in traditional journals.

Whether there is a direct analogy with the freelance writer you are
pointing to Geert, I'm not really sure... Maybe not, but the larger
point that Open Information/Open Archives seems to be the wave of the
future is, I think, reinforced by this example.

Best,

MG

-----Original Message-----
From: Geert Lovink [mailto:geert at xs4all.nl] 
Sent: February 22, 2005 2:35 PM
To: Gurstein, Michael
Cc: reader-list at sarai.net
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Pay or free? Newspaper archives not ready for
openWeb... yet




To respond to Michael... I do not see that the rather inward looking 
and provincial US-American world of academics could possibly be a 
reference for the millions of freelance content producers worldwide. 
Academia is exactly the wrong example as their salaries have already 
been paid for. In that sense it very easy for academics to give away 
their work for free. It makes you wonder why they have been so slow in 
this respect. For small firms and freelance content producers the 
situation is much different. Giving away for free is more related to 
risk taking, in the expectation that something will somehow come 
back--or not. Geert