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NICHES OF QUALITY

See also: Quotes from MoM: "Just like for "terrorism," the international community and the legal system lack a specific definition for copyright (what and who exactly is protected here), and yet severe legal punishments are in place."

The language used in the e-world is typically predominated by economic and technological discourse: for instance, networking, market, business model, user behavior, content providers, consumer preferences, etc. “The User is the Content,” a quote from Marshal McLuhan and the title of this “Meeting of Minds,” is a symptom of the phenomenon of what I will term here as “economification” - that is, fortification within economic models - of non-economic activities. In this text, I shall juxtapose the free market model, on one hand, and education, science and culture (ESC further below), on the other, within digital culture; more specifically, I shall be dealing with the undesirable consequences of commodification of information vs. the Open Access principle.

Applying models from one field of human activity onto another usually produces revealing results and allows for novel approaches to old themes. However, not all applications are exclusively successful. When the free market model is applied at non-profit activities, the disadvantages of such approach can, in some cases, outweigh the intended benefits. When the “content” of the electronic resource within a market model belongs to the realm of ESC, the very nature of the content resists such treatment. To which degree do art-lovers and scholars fit into the categories of “users” and “consumers”? Artists and thinkers into “content-providers” and “producers”? To which degree do beauty, meaning, wisdom, experience and emotion fit into the categories of “product” and “content”?

They certainly fit somehow, but in a way that cripples them significantly. Information, or content, does not necessarily mean knowledge, meaning or thought. Producers do not imply value, art, or experience. The way in which an art-lover enjoys a work of art can hardly be termed as consumption. In the case of ESC, we see how economic and technological jargon can bring to de-signification of the topic. The reductionism needed to cast technical, quantitative and qualitative categories together gives ground to un-differentiating approach and treatment. This, at a price paid in leveling of quality, value and meaning, threeimmeasurable and non-commensurable categories - and the very reason d’etre of education, science and culture.

Free Market vs. Open Access

The “economification” of ESC does not merely imply use of economic jargon or reduction of meaning to mere information. It also includes commodification of such information, which is a part of the larger and longer globalization process (1) . This turn has been legitimized in the public discourse with arguments from the liberal market economic model (2). Meanwhile, some negative side-effects of the commodifying process have motivated large-scale counter-response noticeable today in form of Open Access (OA) movement, a set of diverse and loosely connected local and international initiatives which aim at liberating scientific, artistic and cultural works from commodification and monopolization. In which aspects does OA counter the free market?

Obviously, the free market rules ideally should motivate maximum initiative, flexibility, high quality for competitive fees, consumer-oriented services, and continuous innovation of products. In a free market economy, the state benefits from the taxes collected from the private sector, which it then redistributes to social services and non-profitable sectors, ESC being one of them. Thus, in theory, the economic benefit for some should be the benefit for all. However, the problem occurs in practice, when non-profit creations and non/material commons are privatized, commodified and even monopolized. It is my opinion that the free market effects are of benefit for both the profit- and the non-profit sector only if special niches, such as ESC and non-material commons, are protected from the process of commodification.

While competitiveness is the motivator for free market behavior, sharing and collaboration are the motivators for ESC – ideas come as novel emergent properties of the total human knowledge and experience. ESC creations rarely have clear boundaries and they enter existence within relation to previous creations. While the rules of the market push firms/products to competitive extinction, art works, for instance, can and should co-exist, where their quality brings no collateral damage (one can even argue that their coexistence is mutually beneficial) – a Munch painting does not make a Michelangelo obsolete, in the way gramophone was made obsolete by the CD-player. While economic interest deflates when the market is satiated, the field of ESC is insatiable – can there ever be too much beauty, experience and knowledge? The substantial difference between ESC creations and commodities has been elaborated at great length elsewhere (3), but I hope that the unusual, or rather “uncommodifiable” nature of what ESC has uniquely to offer is already apparent.

The Case of Science

A telling example of how free market economy can have the unintended consequence of being detrimental to its agents is scientific e-publishing. Science is literally dependent on knowledge sharing. In the last decade, e-publishers have formed near-monopolies on scientific content, barring it behind considerable access fees. Here is how the money flow gets perverted in this case:

Scientists usually are funded by state-sponsored agencies and institutes. The academia demands that its members publish on a regular basis; due to the high publishing fees, it is the home institution that usually pays the cost (not a fee to the scientist, but a fee to the publisher). Students, researchers, other scientists and interested amateurs pay a fee to the publisher in order to access scientific research databases. The access fees can be so high, that one may need to be affiliated to an organization (often state-funded) which pays collective access and enables its members to use the content fully and freely.

All in all, the public, or the state, pays twice for science: once to fund the research, and then to access the results of what they have already funded. The publisher is paid twice: by the academia and by the database users. The scientist is paid once, by the academia. We seem to have confused our values in this case, accepting an economic model that favors the ones who provide the medium, the instrument of communication, but neither the value, nor the ones who can enjoy and use that value. Moreover, we have accepted private barriers on shareable knowledge and experience that is supposed to be humanity commons.

Open Access Initiatives

Open Access for education, science and culture, in a nutshell, means digital works, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright restrictions. In response to the rising publishing and access fees of conglomerate e-publishers, a number of scholarly institutions have been recently canceling contracts with for-profit e-publishers and now offer free online access to their works (see the Directory of Open Access Journals for an extensive listing, and Peter Suber’s reports on the process phases). The OA argument is not against profit work, but for de-monopolization of access, tools, rights and fees for ESC-relevant works. Such moderate-line initiatives are at work not only in e-resources, but in the oldest OA initiative, OSS (Open Source Software), in Digital Rights Management (Creative Commons), and elsewhere.

The OA Initiative has been promoted by the UN, the EU, and international NGOs (4) , but most governments still have not gone much further than doing lip service to such projects, refraining from interference in the private publishing sector. On the other hand, it must be mentioned that the strength of OA is visible in its diversity and locality, appearing in different cultures, countries and sub-sectors, without governmental initiatives, public awareness campaigns or much support from the mainstream media.

Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that it was precisely the private sector that taught the non-profiteers how to utilize ICT and apply useful business models to enhance their own effectiveness. Undoubtedly, the non-profit sector benefits from partnership with the private sector, when applying adjusted business and technological models in promoting its unique value. Still, it is of priority to ride the wave and not to be ridden by the wave of technological and economic changes, not to let the instrument change its applicant’s cardinal goal and not let the instrument become a goal in itself.

Conclusion

Although the digital world provides a new medium for ESC, the latter create non-commensurable quality, and not quantifiable material items. If treated as “privatizable” commodities, they lose in value. At present, there is considerable pressure toward commodification of education, science and culture. If ESC works are put under barriers of access fees and privileges, development of knowledge will be impeded and thus the society, and even the profiteers in the long run, will be at loss. The ESC sector must be spared the commodifying game; state and society must develop institutional framework for preserving special niches for these non-material commons of humanity.

(1) Kaldor, Mary. “New and Old Wars: Organized violence in a global era.” Cambridge: Polity 1999.

(2) Most acutely, by the US-based understanding and practice of “free market,” which for the sake of accuracy, is rather different from the UK or other countries’ liberal economic models.

(3) See also John Barlow’s Economy of Ideas.

(4) UN World Summit on the Information Society Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding, Budapest Open Access Initiative, Berlin Declaration, Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, The IFLA Glasgow Declaration on
Libraries, Information Services and Intellectual Freedom