Lawrence Lessig, Do you Floss?London Review of Books, August 18, 2005 (full-text accessible only to subscribers). Reflections on free and open-source software, many of which apply to open-access literature. Excerpt:
We’ve been driven to recognise one kind of economy: the quid pro quo (‘qpq’) economy, in which wages are exchanged for work, or CDs for $20 bills. But examples such as [USENET support groups] suggest we should consider a different model as well: what the internet visionary and Japanese venture capitalist Joi Ito calls the ‘sharing economy’, in which unrelated individuals, often in remote parts of the world, ‘work’ together to produce private and collective goods. The sharing economy is no less an economy for that....[I]t, too, produces significant wealth. But the way this wealth is created is different from the ways of the quid pro quo economy....[Why not demand compensation?] The answer has something to do with the individuals concerned, and something to do with the nature of software. It’s ordinarily hard to understand why anyone would give away something of value, but that’s because usually, giving it away means having less yourself. But software in particular, and knowledge in general, is not like food: when I reveal to you how best to install Word on your computer, I don’t lose that ability myself. As Thomas Jefferson put it nearly two hundred years ago, ‘he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.’ Software, like ideas, is ‘non-rival’. Your using it doesn’t harm me....[C]onsider a more pedestrian example: the English language, say. Language is an anti-rival good: not only does your speaking English not restrict me, your speaking it benefits me. The more people who speak a language, the more useful that language is, at least to those who speak it. We therefore don’t tax foreigners who learn our language; we encourage them, since we benefit from their use of it just as they do. Language in this sense is a commons – everyone has free access to it – but this commons not only doesn’t produce a ‘tragedy of the commons’; it results, as the Yale law professor Carol Rose puts it, in a ‘comedy of the commons’....The clearest example is academic publication, where ‘free revealing’ (publishing in open access journals) increases the number of citations the academic receives.
(Thanks to Matt Cockerill.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/11/2005 03:11:00 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.
