5. Pictures of Knowledge Development and Dissemination

5.3. Information vs. property

The big advantage of information is that although good quality information is expensive to produce, once it has been produced there is no lower bound upon the cost of its replication. Intellectual property rights are precisely an attempt to levy a price on the replication of information*1. This price can be explicit as in fees for access to journals and copyright fees or it can be implicit in that one may have to go to a certain place to get it.

Journals (whether paper or on-line) have tended to own their content, in that they control its appearance and own the copyright. The ownership of the copyright was necessary to protect the publisher and allow them to recoup their costs. Now that many of these costs have gone the review process does not have to be associated with the ownership of papers. The ownership of papers will necessarily impose (explicit or implicit) costs upon the distribution of knowledge. Review boards would discard this part of the journal tradition. For example it could become common that different boards review the same paper according to their own criteria developed to suit different audiences.

A Proposal for the Establishment of Review Boards - Bruce Edmonds - 16 MAR 99

[Next] [Previous] [Up] [Top] [Contents]

Generated with CERN WebMaker