Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Does Information Want To Be Free? If you had free online access to all of the content of this Journal, would you pay for a subscription? Think about this for a moment before reading on. I might. I like to page through the printed copy. I appreciate the care the editorial staff has taken to juxtapose related articles and the opportunity for synergistic browsing. I find useful information in the advertisements. The format is convenient and I can use it anywhere—without a computer, Kindle, or wireless connection. Nevertheless, many graduate students and younger faculty members are perfectly satisfied to have an online subscription that is paid for by a university or other institution. These readers, who are rapidly becoming the majority, use online searches and read articles online. Why pay for the same thing if you can get it free? This is a dilemma that all journals, magazines, and newspapers face. Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for a printed copy, costs are going up, and the era of personal journal subscriptions may be ending. During my 12 years as JCE editor the total number of individual subscriptions has fallen by approximately 20%, despite the fact that prices have remained constant and we have made strong efforts to retain subscribers. Much of our revenue is now derived from institutions, not individuals. Subscription fees pay for production and distribution, salaries of our excellent editorial staff here in Madison, support of our Secondary School Chemistry Section, technical expertise needed to keep this Journal online with the latest features in a changing Web environment, and creating special issues on occasions such as National Chemistry Week and Earth Day. We are non-profit, so all of the fees are used to make the JCE as good as it can be. Without subscriptions, this would be a very different (perhaps nonexistent) Journal. Proponents of open access journals (in which the content is free) often quote Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) as saying, “information wants to be free”. What Brand actually said at the Hacker’s Conference in 1984 was On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. (1)
(A slightly different form appears in Brand’s book about the MIT media lab (2).) The fighting is real. High quality information needs to cost something, else how can the quality be supported? The main point of Brand and others who have repeated his mantra is that information needs to be available, but not necessarily gratis. Proponents of open access argue that because the government pays for research through grants, the research should be published where all taxpayers can read and use it. This assumes that everything published is the result of government-supported
research, which is not true High quality information of the JCE. In a year we may publish two or three needs to cost something, articles that acknowledge support from the NIH, else how can the quality for example, and a significant fraction acknowledge be supported? no federal support at all. Also, the government is a notoriously fickle partner in publication of useful materials. A case in point is the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse (ENC), which was supported for many years as a repository of professional development materials, lesson plans, Web resources, and much more for K–12 education. As of September 29, 2005, the U.S. Department of Education ended its support of ENC. Consequently, if you go to the ENC Web site now, you are asked to subscribe in order to get access to the materials that used to be free. Open-access proponents further assume that editing and publication add little or no value beyond what was originally submitted. This too is false for a large fraction of the articles in this Journal. Our copy editors and graphics editor correct usage, resolve issues of ambiguous or contradictory statements, revise graphs and chemical structures for clarity, readability, and accuracy, and help authors present their work in the best possible way. Of course this produces a higher quality product, but is that what is really wanted today? Audiophiles said that MP3 could not be successful because of its less than optimal quality, but CD sales have plummeted because most people find the ability to copy and share music files more compelling than high fidelity. Is this Journal barking up the wrong tree by trying to achieve the highest quality product? If that’s not what our audience wants, then we need to know so that we can concentrate on what is really important. I would like to hear what you think. Please contact me by email (
[email protected]) or respond to the blogged version of this editorial at http://expertvoices.nsdl. org/chemeddl/. The more we know about what you value in this Journal, the better we can serve you. Literature Cited 1. Report from the first Hacker’s Conference printed in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review, p 49. 2. Brand, Stewart. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT; Penguin Books: New York, 1988; p 202; see also http://www.anu. edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF.html (accessed Sep 2008).
Supporting JCE Online Material
http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2008/Nov/abs1467.html Full text (HTML and PDF) with links to cited URLs Blogged at http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/chemeddl/
© Division of Chemical Education • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 85 No. 11 November 2008 • Journal of Chemical Education
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