Even if that work is writing.
A weird commotion has broken out in the comments on Mark’s post. Unfortunately not about new forces and interactions in the dark sector, which would be great, but about the grave evil done by the profiteering meanies at Scientific American and their witting collaborators, Mark and Jonathan Feng. These two upstanding physicists have apparently written an article that you have to pay to read. It appears that the article is in some sort of “magazine,” an archaic collection of periodic writings that traditionally charge fees for people to access. Bizarre! (The comedy is kicked up a proverbial notch by people blaming the argument on “the extreme left.”)
There is an interesting and important discussion to be had about the best way to efficiently organize an economy of writers and readers in the internet age. This isn’t that discussion. The interesting discussion would consider the tradeoffs between systems with fees, paywalls, advertising, sponsorship, subscriptions, micropayments, and so on. This discussion, in contrast, was kicked off by “paying money for knowledge is plain idiotic” and went downhill from there. (Of all the Laws of the Internet, the firmest is the Second Law of Commentodynamics: in an isolated comment thread, disorder and waste heat only increase with time.)
Paying for knowledge happens all the time. We buy books and magazines, we pay to enter museums, we pay tuition at colleges and universities, and so on. Information on the internet is not, in principle, any different. There’s a lot that is available for free, and that’s great. It does not follow that it should all be free.
If enough resources are free on the internet, it will certainly become more difficult for outlets such as traditional newspapers and magazines to charge for content. They have to both 1) make the case that they add some sort of substantive value, and 2) make the fees small enough and unobtrusive enough that people won’t mind paying. It’s not the only model; at the moment, giving things away but associating them with advertising seems to be more prevalent. We live in an era when the timescales over which technology is changing are substantially less than the time it takes for new economic structures to emerge and mature into equilibrium. This doesn’t change the basic fact that people like getting paid for the work they do, or they might not do it. Which, if that work consists of providing useful services like interesting articles about science addressed to the general public, would be too bad.
It seems that if one writes a textbook on time one is otherwise paid for, then the money should go to whoever pays the salary. On the other hand, some people are not paid to work certain times, or a certain number of hours, but to do a certain amount of work. In that case, as long as the “real” work is not neglected, the employer might even like textbooks to be written, since they often include the author’s affiliation. At least if they are good, they are essentially free advertising.
Some academic work might suffer, but not all. I remember once reading the “Reports from the Observatories” in the sadly defunct and sorely missed Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. When checking out Sussex, there were something like a dozen single-author papers by John D. Barrow in one year, all in prestigious journals (and he was author on other papers as well). In the same year, he wrote a couple of popular books. I asked someone who worked in Sussex at the time what his hours were, and he replied “pretty much 9 to 5”. I don’t know if he wrote the popular books during working hours or not.
Two points that don’t seem to have been mentioned:
1) Yes, as Robert said, SciAm once upon a time was a great magazine. But the quality has decreased substantially over the years, and the recent acquisition of SciAm by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has, if anything, pushed the quality down by quite a bit.
2) NPG is evil. NPG has been launching new, unneeded and overpriced journals at an alarming rate over the past several years, with no sign of slowing down despite the major worldwide recession. (Alas scientists are only human, and are quite susceptible to the “prestige” of publishing in a journal with “Nature” on the cover). NPG also dramatically increased the library subscription prices of SciAm in both print and online versions, with the result that many academic libraries no longer subscribe to SciAm online and get only one print copy.
Nothing wrong with charging for good content, properly edited for clarity and correctness.
Clear skies, Alan
I think part of this “debate” stems from the substantive difference between different points of access to stored digital media. When i was still teaching i had free access to all of the Jstor system paid for through the university. Now that i am retired, i simply cannot afford it, but do have a library down the street with limited access. Jstor charges very high premiums to universities and colleges (in the $30k+ range and higher), lesser ones to community colleges (with some reduction in services), and so forth down to secondary students who pay $250 per year for highly limited service. When a professor has completely unlimited access at work, and finds highly restricted access at home (unless s/he uses his university server system from home), those sorts of frustrations become irritants.
Obvious but necessary comment: the *really* sad thing here is that nobody is discussing the *physics* content of the original article. Just a load of boring predictable bullshit, including [especially] blog posts about the morality of whatever. This blog increasingly resembles the fabled oozlum bird:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oozlum_bird
ICTP (the Abdus Salam International Centre of Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy) gives folks in poor countries reduced/free access to top journals. I wish this was more generalized. While for you 20 dollars for access to some article is nothing, for some of us is a fortune. I’m sure you don’t advocate knowledge-access for the rich only, do you?
For years I heard how farmers faced great financial struggles for all the hard work they did in providing food for our tables. It was costing more to raise a cow then what a cow sold for. I wondered why farmers didn’t get together and just hold back the food from our tables. We would all go hungry while they continued to eat and end up with a much stronger negotiation position. But then I realized it is next to impossible to get farmers around the world to unify so that they could better their lot. Competition between individuals always trumps good of the community.
Now imagine if scientists united and held back their work, the contents of their brains only passing in secret among themselves. What if the rest of the world went without the benefits of scientific endeavor? What if there were no new articles to publish, no new textbooks, no teaching younger generations, no advancements in medicine and computer technology, no nanoscience, no new discoveries… that is, except for scientists who were the only one to enjoy the benefits of their own hard work.
Wait, this might make a good novel… nevermind…
thanks for your sharing
First, I was addressing the general idea of “not paying for knowledge”, not this particular instance. Second, the authors have pointed out that one can read about their academic research free of charge, elsewhere. Third, there have certainly been times and places where the private sector funded academic research.
The old ‘Information Want To Be Free’ garbage surfaces again. Fail!
When it comes down to it, if your toilet is plugged up, wouldn’t you value a plumber more than a rock star? Bottom line – if you don’t want to pay, nobody’s making you play. Just stop bitching unless you’re willing to work for nothing.