Free Culture 2008 Conference

Today I attended the Free Culture 2008 conference, sponsored by Students for Free Culture.   Students for Free Culture has many chapters around the country, including at UC Berkeley (which hosted today's conference.)   For the Students, "a free culture is one where all members are free to participate in its transmission and evolution, without artificial limits on who can participate or in what way."  Their goals are broadly aligned with those of the Creative Commons and the open access movement. 

In fact, Students for Free Culture is one of the sponsors of the first annual Open Access Day next week (along with the Public Library of Science and SPARC.)  UCSF has several events planned, and I am looking forward to it.

Michael Eisen, one of the founders of the Public Library of Science and a biologist at Berkeley, spoke during the final panel.  Eisen is one of the flame throwers of the open access movement, but he's put his money where his mouth is; he earned tenure with a CV that only included open access articles.

Amy Kapczynski, a law professor at Berkeley, was on the panel with Eisen.   She warned against simplistic analyses of the concept of intellectual property (IP).  Activists might think that shedding the world of IP will cause generic drugs to proliferate and ideas to flow. Although these are noble goals, Kapczynski pointed out that we do need some form of IP protection in order to ensure that researchers are innovative.  The problem now is that our laws and treaties are skewed in favor of closed-off IP, even when people want to share their work with the world.  Kapcynski advocated thoughtful reform for this situation, rather than root and branch destruction of all IP.

Although Kapczynski's remarks weren't in direct response to Michael Eisen (she spoke before he did), later I realized that her comments were an implicit rebuke to his perspective.  I fully support the goals of the open access movement, and think that all taxpayers should be able to read the research articles that their tax dollars helped to fund.  But we don't need to destroy all commercial publishers in order to make this happen. 

It's possible to imagine a scenario in which the core research literature is immediately free upon publication, while commercial publishers build value-added services (commentaries, syntheses, sophisticated databses) that people pay for.   Or a pure open access publisher could make everything free, even these value-added components, and find other ways to pay for it (such as author payments, grants, etc.) 

Eisen would have us dismantle the commercial publishers, with no concern for the great disruption in scholarly communication that would result Yes, the system that we have now is unfair and irrational...but it's what we have regardless, and major changes could have major ripple effects.

Another simplistic component of Eisen's remarks: The notion that access to journal articles alone will solve all problems.  Indeed it would be awesome if everyone in the world could read the scientific literature.  But without the infrastructure to act on this research, we've only solved part of the problem (and not even the most important part.)  This infrastructure deficit is endemic in the developing world.  I want researchers in Nigeria to have access to every last article published, but refuse to convince myself that this is all they need.

Comments

[Michael Eisen]

You're of course free to make whatever idealogical points you want to on your blog. But please don't ascribe things to me that I never said. I never said, implied or thought that the ONLY thing Nigerians - or anyone - needs is access to scientific journals. My point was - and always has been - that we can easily provide it to them, and so we should. And while I do not think it would be a disaster if all existing scientific publishers (commercial and non-commercial - including PLoS) suddenly disappeared, perhaps you were too busy blogging to have actually listened to my presentation in which I proposed a gradual 5 year transition from subscriptions to open access models for journals - precisely so that we would not have a noticeable disruption in scientific communication.

[Marcus]

Thanks for commenting Michael. I actually blogged that night, after listening to you carefully, and we just have a difference of opinion.