It’s not a direct follow-up to yesterday’s piece in The New York Times, but it’s interesting to see how many groups are dealing with the possibilities of distributing content free on the web in addition to or instead of through traditional print models. This time, it’s the faculty of Harvard:
“‘In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,’ said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. ‘It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.’”
This all sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?
“The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of open access, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals’ value and wreck the existing business model. Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo. It would also cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational training and professional meetings, they say.”
The interesting difference is that nobody seems to think there’s a reasonable argument that free content will support those traditional models. In fact, aside from the gatekeepers of those traditional models, nobody seems to care much whether it does or not.