Accessibility of a Scholarly idea
Would you?
If you have a chance to get to know the scientists from all around the world, do you want to grab this chance and make some connection with them? Some people might say, No! I don’t want to because they are pretty much using a language from a different world, the world of science. But what happen if you are a scholar that could actually understand some of the languages? I bet that the answer should be Yes! After all, the purpose of being a scholar, besides making some money or becoming famous, is to disseminate knowledge so as to help the society to become increasingly better. With that being said, does the valuable information or knowledge could only be understood by a scholar? In other words, does the key that could open the giant gate of knowledge have to be at the hand of a scholarly backgrounded personnel?
Well…
The answer is uncertain since there are amateur scholars who might have valuable perspective in regards to knowledge from a certain field, or undergraduate or graduate student who might be encountering some difficulty when pursuing their ultimate dream, become a more influential person and do some goods to the society. Those people’s voice should be, but right now wasn’t, heard. Just as Nathan Jurgenson said in his advice in Inside higher ED, “being a sociology graduate student, I sometimes feel like Simmel’s “stranger,” close enough to academia to observe, but distant enough to retain an outside perspective. Like many graduate students staring down a possible academic career path, I’m a bit terrified at the elephant in the room…”
Me!
Yes, as a Wake Forest Undergraduate student, I can totally resonate with him, especially when I was being terrified by the fact that I need to reach out to a certain level, like a Ph. D degree, or become a college professor, in order to communicate with others scholars that have the same expertise area with me. But, what kind of refinement could we possibly construct in order to solve such problem?
I think…
In my opinion, this communication block might be solved by two refinements: a refinement of writing style and a refinement of publication. Firstly, if one, a random person, want to communicate with a true scholar and mutually help each other to gain a new perspective in certain area, then this person and this scholar will be better off when they are speaking the same language, this does not necessarily means that they have to come from the same country, since right now, we could use some advanced translation tools to solve the language problem. But what I really mean is that they need to truly understand what each other is talking about! You don’t want to spend your entire afternoon sitting in front of a computer and guess what the people on the other side are talking about because that can be described as a largely inefficient way of communication. However, we could not ask anybody to finish a college degree and participate in this pool of communication, therefore, the most efficient way that I can think about is to demand the scholar to write in an understandable way, to an extent which the public could understand what the scholar is talking about after spending some time reading with confusion. With the refinement of writing style, I do believe that the communication barrier could be diminished for a bit.
Again, I think…
Secondly, we will talk about the refinement of publication. Nowadays, a lot of scholars will publish their article on certain influential journals, traded articles etc.. Though they sometimes will publish their work in a public domain or grand access to the public, still, a random person walking on the street might have to pay a significant amount of money in order to get access to the article that one scholar wrote. Why would somebody want to spend a large amount of money and buy just one article from the website instead of having a real fancy dinner with their family? Therefore, with the refinement of publication, on one side, the scholar should continue to publish their work under public domain, like Facebook, Twitter, or even the Medium etc. and tell people from all around the world that they can “feel free to comment on it”. While on the other side, the publication company could do a price discrimination or a financial-aid program, which means that the publication company should consider about lowering the price of their presses when it comes to selling to the public domain like a state library or a public website. In this way, those people that want to know some advanced knowledge about the world but are not willing to, or even not able to, pay for that knowledge could have access to the acme of the knowledge world. Or those publication company could also do a financial-aid program, which is a program that could be applied by random people if they want to get access to those scholarly articles. And once people were being admitted, they only need to pay for a small amount of money in order to read books and fulfill their need for knowledge.
After all…
I know that our current system exists for a reason, and I acknowledge the survival need for those publication companies to continue to charge a substantial amount of money for a person or an institute to get access to their own publication. But still, if we could create a sharing process where, as Nathan Jurgenson points out in his advice in Inside Higher ED, “articles that are available free to everyone that have not been printed and shipped are considered as legitimate by academics in power…” this process will be an epical advance step in our world of knowledge.
