Dana G. Dalrymple, Scientific Knowledge as a Public Good, The Scientist, June 23, 2005. Excerpt: 'The public goods characteristic of ideas and knowledge – that they are freely available to all and are not diminished by use – can be traced to St. Augustine (circa 400). Adam Smith laid the conceptual economic basis for public goods in 1776, but economists did not give much attention to them until the mid-1950s. However, it has been difficult to reduce knowledge to numerical form and measurement, particularly in the basic sciences, so that there is little hard data on the linkage between scientific knowledge and [economic] growth. Still, it is safe to say that scientific knowledge in its pure form is a classic public good. As such, it is a keystone for innovation and in its more applied forms is a basic component of the economy. The problem, however, is that the production of such knowledge has a cost, and the results are not necessarily available to all....IBM, for example, recently announced that it would release 500 patents. Similarly, some multinational biotechnology firms have adopted a market segmentation strategy that permits the use of certain food and agricultural technologies in developing countries. How do we encourage such efforts? [Bruce] Alberts [President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences] proposed asking scientific journals to make their journals freely available on the Web after a delay of not more than a year, and changing the intellectual property protections that are arranged by public sector research institutions. In what might be considered a model of such a change, the University of California, Berkeley, has a "socially responsible licensing program" designed to cover technologies that promise exceptional benefit to the developing world; licenses are provided on a royalty-free basis. Several other universities have similar programs.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/23/2005 03:44:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
