Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Freeing Information What would possess the author of a commercially published book to make the book available for free download on the Internet? That’s just what Lawrence Lessig has done (1). Intrigued by a newspaper story that reported this seeming anomaly, I went to the Web site. What I found was a fascinating book—one that I recommend for holiday reading. I also discovered that although the online version was free, I purchased the book anyway, and my understanding of the importance of carefully edited, printed text was broadened and enhanced. Why did I purchase something that I could have free? For several reasons. First, the printed version is much more convenient than the online version. Printed text on paper is easier to read, the book weighs about a quarter as much as my laptop, and its $24.95 cost was well worth the convenience of having the book at hand when I wanted to read it. Also, the online version actually wasn’t free, because I would have to print it. The printed area of the page is about 4.5 ⫻ 6.75 inches and there are about 400 pages, so if I printed the book on standard paper I would use close to a ream of paper (printed one side only) and at least 50% more area per page. What a waste of paper, not to mention the $30 ink-jet cartridge for the printer. Finally, my brief perusal on the Internet revealed that this is a book I will probably want to refer to again and again. Black ink on white paper will last for at least a century, but who knows how long the online version, even as a copy on my hard disk, will remain intact and readable. There are other advantages of printed material, such as this Journal. The arrival of each issue prompts us to peruse the issue. When something is uploaded to a Web server, it has to be searched for or the publisher has to email readers that they can go look for it. In the current email world, a reminder about a journal is less than a needle in a haystack of promotions of medicines, performance-enhancing drugs, software, and worse. Printed words on pages also foster serendipity through browsing. JCE editorial staff work hard to juxtapose related articles so that readers can make discoveries that an online search might not reveal. For example, a recent issue prompted this response from a reader, “Sorry about the mess of emails. But that November issue was really something! Nice job there on the entropy front.” Perhaps all of the entropy discussion would have been found by a search, but turning over a page to find the next, closely related article is still easier than clicking back and forth on a screen. Returning to the reasons for purchasing something that I could get for free, perhaps the most important reason for purchasing printed material is that the author and publisher deserve support for their efforts in making the book’s content available to everyone else. Making scientific journals and other intellectual content available free for everyone is a popular and enticing idea, but it ignores much hidden value added to every publication by the reviewers, editors, and publisher. Without such quality control, it becomes alwww.JCE.DivCHED.org
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Make a New Year’s resolution to encourage more of your students and colleagues to subscribe to this Journal and support the efforts of staff, reviewers, authors, and everyone who makes it possible.
most impossible to sort the good from the much greater volume of chaff. Recently one of my students was looking for good Web-based content on VSEPR theory. Google gave tens of thousands of hits, but after she had evaluated the first 100 Web sites, only two met all of her criteria for a good tutorial on VSEPR. There is a great deal of value in peer review and in editing, but these are not jobs that get done without some paid workers to keep things on track—and someone has to pay them. This Journal has liberal policies on use of our printed and online material. These are described in more detail on page 172. In essence they allow you—the subscriber—to copy any printed page or anything from JCE Online and make it available to your class, as long as you don’t also make it available to the whole world on the Internet. Laboratory experiments are made available in a format that can be adapted to local use and reproduced for all students in a class. Recently I heard from one reader who indicated that about half the experiments done in an updated lab program came from JCE. Our overall goal is just such use of our materials, and we charge the bare minimum needed to maintain the necessary editorial staff. More and more I hear from students that they don’t need to subscribe to JCE because their institution’s library has an IP-number subscription. At one recent talk only members of the audience who appeared to be older than 50 raised their hands when I asked who had an individual subscription. That’s too bad, because students and younger faculty who are seriously interested in chemical education should be reaping the benefits of getting a printed copy of JCE every month and should also be lending their financial support to both printed and online versions. Make a New Year’s resolution to encourage more of your students and colleagues to subscribe to this Journal and support the efforts of staff, reviewers, authors, and everyone who makes it possible. Literature Cited 1. Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity; Penguin Press: New York, 2004. See http://free-culture.org/ freecontent/ (accessed Nov 2004).
Vol. 82 No. 1 January 2005
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Journal of Chemical Education
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