Keep Learning America: Why we need to change access to privileged information
How do we advance knowledge? As members of mankind I mean, how do we acquire knowledge and build upon it? For centuries this has been and extremely important question and scientific advancement has hinged on the efficiency of the dissemination of knowledge. Before the first written languages were created, knowledge was passed down from generation to generation through word of mouth; through stories and songs of epic quests and past experiences. Obviously this method is best compared to an adolescent game of telephone, with much of the knowledge learned being transformed and/or slowly forgotten. Once humans could write down information, the spread of information increased, albeit one would have to physically be at the location of the writing to have access. The spread of knowledge was now as effective as the efficiency with which new information could be reproduced by hand. But how could that efficiency be further increased? … Introducing the printing press.
Now information could be mass-produced to reach a much wider audience, and consequently scientific advancements have soared since. However this is where things get tricky, and the spread of knowledge has found itself stuck in traffic so to speak. Back during the golden age of print, publishing companies were providing a great service to scholars and researchers alike. Publication was extremely expensive, and so if you wished to publish your article for others to see you’d submit it to a publisher, who would then make sure it was peer reviewed, potentially in color, and finally available for purchase. It WAS always a good system, soo don’t fix it if it ain’t broke right? Wrong. Since the invention of the world wide web we’ve taken even grander scientific leaps as a species, and information access has widely shifted into the digital realm. In theory we now have access to all this amazing information at the click of a button, from anywhere on earth, right? Unfortunately wrong again. Although the medium (pun intended) through which we search and acquire information has changed, our access to all this knowledge has not. So even though the digital realm has enabled publishing companies to greatly decrease their operating and publishing costs, the cost they charge the public for that “privileged” information has exponentially increased, with the across the board average for scholarly journal yearly subscriptions ranging in the thousands of dollars. Did you know that you could end up spending 40 plus dollars for an online article that you can’t possibly fully evaluate beforehand? How many articles would you have to buy before finding the one you needed? The current publishing system isn’t dead, but it isn’t helping further the dissemination of knowledge. We need to find a better system; one that allows scholars to make their research more accessible to a greater audience, one that puts scholarly authors and information seekers in the drivers seat.
Perhaps an all-encompassing online open access database can rise to the occasion. The organization could operate in some ways similarly to crowd funding platforms. Research studies could be showcased on the site with all pertinent information and readers could decide to donate to and or promote that particular scientific research. It would be able to put scholarly researchers in contact with other scholarly experts more quickly to promote collaborative scientific advancement; which would also serve as a light peer review process. It would also be able to put the public in a position to directly interact with scholarly researchers to provide back and forth constructive feedback. Once the study is complete, it would be published right there in the database; providing open access to view the information with lessened copyright limitations. Whether or not this entity would be the best way to enact positive change is yet to be determined, but one thing remains certain; we must start the conversation in order to begin brainstorming a solution to the issue affecting the slowing spread of scientific knowledge. If the whole idea of scientific research is to advance humanity’s collective understanding of the world, limiting the spread of knowledge to only a small group of privileged individuals is an extremely ineffective technique.
