blog de notas de juan freire

1. They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.
2. In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large “bundles”, which will include many journals that those libraries do not actually want. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting the fact that some of their journals are essential.
3. They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.

La reacción de  Timothy Gowers, matemático de la Universidad de Cambridge, y medallista Fields, está organizando un boicot a Elsevier:

… What about coordination between academics? What is to stop all the other editorial boards of Elsevier journals following the example of the board of the Journal of Topology? I actually don’t know the answer to that: I can only assume that not enough people on those editorial boards care to make it worth it to them to go through what is likely to be a somewhat unpleasant and time-consuming process.

If top-down approaches to the problem don’t work, then what about bottom-up approaches? Why do any of us publish papers in Elsevier journals? …

La respuesta de Graham Taylor, Director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the UK Publishers Association, en The Guardian (Branding academic publishers ‘enemies of science’ is offensive and wrong).

Three Finnish researchers have created an online service that could eventually replace or supplement the current way journals get scientists to peer review submitted manuscripts. Already partnered with the ecology journal Ecography, published by Wiley, Peerage of Scienceis an innovative social network of scientists to which researchers submit their manuscripts; other members with relevant expertise, alerted by keywords in the papers, will then provide reviews that scientific journals can use to decide whether to publish the work. University of Jyväskylä and the University of Eastern Finland, where the three creators of the service are based, have sponsored the company founded to further build up the service this year…

… Yochai Benkler – Carlota Perez – John Battelle – Howard Rheingold – Henry Jenkins – Lawrence Lessig – Barabara Ehrenrich – Danah Boyd – Soshana Zubhoff – Thomas Frank – Robert McChesney – Joseph Steiglitz … and there is more, all point to a world that is in flux, in transition and mutating. Enclosing the commons and locking down culture will do massive and irreparable damage to this country. Something that as someone that is supposed to be championing business in the UK should understand?

Carlota Perez talks about the patterns of technological revolutions and how they impact industry, society and culture.

When the economy is shaken by a powerful set of new opportunities with the emergence of the next technological revolution, society is still strongly wedded to the old paradigm and its institutional framework. The world of computers, flexible production and the internet has a different logic and different requirements from those that facilitated the spread of the automobile, synthetic materials, mass production and the highway network. Suddenly in relation to the new technologies, the old habits and regulations become obstacles, the old services and infrastructures are found wanting, the old organisations and institutions inadequate. A new context must be created; a new ‘common sense’ must emerge and propagate.

We are migrating from a Read Only (R/O to a Read/Write (R/W)culture. The Read Only (R/O) and Read/Write (R/W) transmission and production of artistic and cultural content. Read Only characterized the passive transmission of culture through the 1900s, while Read/Write has characterized the production of culture in the 19th century-and, now, the late 20th and early 21st centuries-allowing for active and collective making and remaking of content…

… The new institutional reality could be described as follows:

THE FIRST LAYER: COLLABORATIVE PLATFORMS

- At the core are the enabling collaborative socio-technological platforms, that allow knowledge workers, software developers and open design communities to collaborate on joint projects, outside of the direct control of corporate entities.

THE SECOND LAYER: OPEN DESIGN COMMONS