To Universities: Give it Away

Knowledge is meant to be shared.

Universities are in the knowledge business.

• They create it with research.
• They share it with education, books, and article publishing.
• They organize it, curate it, and interpret it in their libraries, datasets, and faculty.

Prior to invention of the printing press, knowledge resided primarily in the minds of the people who knew things. Books were expensive to reproduce, because they had to be copied by hand.

In fact, the very first university lectures were little more than a group of scribes, copying word-for-word. A Reader with a valuable book would stand at a lectern, reading from the text, so that the students could copy it over into their own notebooks in parallel, which was much more efficient than passing the book around so the students could take turns making their own copies.

But after the invention of the printing press (one of the earliest harbingers of the Industrial Revolution), books and manuscripts could be reproduced at scale, for way less money.

Book production costs declined by over 75% after invention of the printing press (reproduced from https://ourworldindata.org/books, with data from Zanden 2009, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution).

The production of knowledge exploded when the cost of documenting, sharing, and archiving it came down.