Lisbet Rausing

“ The opportunity costs for society are self-evident. But what about the opportunity cost for scholars? For example, the public has set itself the task to rewrite knowledge for the public domain through Wikipedia and the like. Should not these sites be hyperlinked with JSTOR? By excluding the public from their scholarly literature, academics make it impossible for amateurs to use sound research methodologies, critically examining evidence by cross-referencing and source analysis. Scholars then critique the public’s output for not being sufficiently academic. ”

“ However, the research done in my field, the history of science, offers comfort in the morbid but accurate observation—ultimately traceable to Kuhnian theory—that “science marches ahead one funeral at a time.” Obstacles can delay, but not stop, a technological rupture of this magnitude. Excepting the odd Wykehamist or yeshiva boy, our children—always on, multi-tasking, mobile—will not engage with a body of scholarship their elders have incomprehensibly surrounded by barbed wire. But they will remain engaged in learning. The question is not whether there will be future scholars. ”

“ The public does not even have allemansrätt, to use the Swedish medieval term for the right to roam, on those vast thought-lands that lie fallow and abandoned. Because of copyright, few dare to adopt these orphaned works into the public domain, no matter how central they are for scholarship, or how interesting to the general public. Few dare to re-issue them even in paper format. Additionally, restrictive fair use-rules mean that libraries that own a copy do not dare digitize it for the public domain or even for their own constituencies. ”

“ Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome.
Well, why not imagine this library? Realizing such a dream is no longer a question of technology. Remarkable electronic libraries are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The nonprofit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts. To do research, only one in a hundred American college students turn first to their university catalogue. Over 80 percent turn first to Google. ”

“ As things stand, scholars sign over their copyrights to for-profit academic presses and journals. Sometimes, in violation of their contracts, they also post their works on their own websites. Publishers are not suing yet. It is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” standoff. But that is hardly ideal. It means that free public access to scholarship, as far as it exists in fragments here and there, is based on a wholesale violation of copyright. And, in any case, self-archiving is inherently unstable and transient. ”

“ We must first understand that the nature of the library is changing. Traditionally, libraries have been conceived as protective vessels in a world where information is scarce. Our iconic library stories are romances of destruction, decay, and amnesia. ”

“ After all, there are no substitute goods, and the purchasers of the journals (university libraries, but ultimately university administrators) are not the consumers (the professors and students) . Thus, publicly-funded institutions first give away and then buy back their own research, research that they paid for in the first place. To add insult to injury, these for-profit journals are produced by unpaid, volunteer editors and peer reviewers. Here, too, labor is donated for free, by those same scholars who also sign over their copyrights for free. ”

“ In the longer term, the question is not whether the Web will be scholarly in some perfectly meaningful sense. It is whether traditional twentieth-century scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences will be integrated into that emerging, increasingly cross-referenced and even more scholarly world of the web. ”

“ Congress is the academic publishers’ most natural client and constituency, and—thanks to their alliance with Hollywood and the music industry—their success in locking up and rendering irrelevant the output of academic research has been nothing less than astonishing. ”

“ Could academics put their own house in order? University teachers may not be able to put course materials into the public domain. But they can issue reading lists, and they can YouTube the lectures as well as summarizing them—or ask students to summarize them— on Wikipedia. Each one of us, in our own station, can help to open up scholarship to the public. ”

“ Answering that challenge will require some soul-searching: Do we have the generosity to collaborate? Can we build legal, organizational, and financial structures that will preserve and order—but also share and disseminate the learning of the world? ”

“ The narrowness of these constituencies is worth stressing, because many people think that the great university libraries set out to serve the public. They do not, at least not directly.
This matters, because the public today is not the public of 50 years ago. Okies, hillbillies, sharecroppers, and mill workers may not have had the energy or learning to engage with scholars. But today’s public is educated and engaged. Indeed, it has proven this by participating in the collective knowledge projects that the technological rupture has enabled. The World Community Grid signs up volunteer computers. ”

“ It is clear that if a new Alexandria is to be built, it needs to be built for the long term, with an unwavering commitment to archival preservation and the public good. A true public good itself, it probably needs to be largely governmentally funded. And, while a global and cooperative venture, it needs to be hosted by one organisation that is reputable, long-standing, nonprofit, and exists in a stable jurisdiction. ”

“ When we are no longer are able to safeguard only remnants of our discourses on thought, memory, and images, but the thoughts, memories, and images themselves—complete? What do we do when we have not only the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but also Vasari’s blog, wiki, twitter, texts, emails, chatroom, Facebook, radio interviews, TV appearances, and electronic notebooks? ”

“ It is beyond the capacity of any one library or university, especially if the data to be mined is raw and unorganized—such as digital satellite imagery, census data, survey responses, and the like Moreover, such studies might engage not only university-affiliated scholars, but also the community. ”

“ Scholars have traditionally gated and protected knowledge, yet also shared and distributed it in libraries, schools, and universities. We have stood for a republic of learning that is wider than the ivory tower, and now is the time to do so again. ”

“ Scholars engage less with the “hive mind”—the public—when it comes to more complex or interpretative work. There are exceptions. For example, in Israel, the Rothschild family and others are pioneering a project to put the Dead Sea Scroll fragments into a public domain website, thereby engaging with religious communities that have unparalleled language skills. ”

“ And even if none are, don’t we want to preserve them all, regardless, so that one day we can run larger studies on them, studies perhaps as yet unimaginable, because they depend on computer uses not yet invented? ”

“ In 2008, the Internet’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee, reflecting on his topsy-turvy child, noted that the Web’s vast emergent properties are perhaps best modelled by biological concepts, such as plasticity, population dynamics, food chains, and ecosystems. ”

“ The legal profession rightly worries about judgments based on since-vanished references, and those of us who work in twentieth-century history or the social sciences know the difficulties of citing ever-changing websites. ”

“ In foldReCAPTCHA, amateurs help digitize The New York Times’ back catalogue. In the ESP project, the public has labelled some 50 million photographs to train computers to think. In GalaxyZoo, some 160,000 people help astronomers at Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere to classify galaxies, and in Africa@home, volunteers study satellite images of Africa, to help the University of Geneva create useful modern maps. Conservation biology, a whole academic field, depends on amateur surveys, both outdoors and in historical collections. ”

“ They are all closed to the public. It is wonderful, of course, that high-energy physics and string theory are open to all. But is it not ironic that we have opened the gates only to that scholarship which few professors, let alone members of the public, have the cognitive capacity and appropriate training to grasp? ”

“ Karl Marx and Adam Smith, both experts on the natural evil of monopoly, would nod knowingly on learning that an annual subscription for a scholarly journal can cost up to $25,000, and that the price per page for commercial journals is up to twelve times more than for non-profit ones. ”

“ The ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN—that 27-kilometer underground circular tunnel used to search for the Higgs boson—takes 90 million measurements 600 million times a second, and these are analyzed by some 6,000 high energy physicists. Worldwide, stored scientific data is approaching a petabyte and doubles every year. ”

“ It is a thought-provoking experience. Many make very clear indeed that they are commercially owned and thus debarred to all, except for those able to pay eye-watering fees. And even university-controlled collections are expensive. ”