publishing

This morning I received a very interesting email from Mills Kelly (http://edwired.org/) of George Mason University asking if I would be willing to be interviewed for a piece on digital scholarship. I'm delighted Mills is doing this and will be happy to talk. But I'm not sure everyone will be happy with my answers.

 

Harvard's recent Open Access publishing mandate makes me think about what it would look like to make a national, interoperable open archive, across all of the libraries, across all the electronic archives, and that took into consideration production as well as consumption in its general business plan. Can't we all get along? (Aphorism for the day: We are all interconnected. You cannot starve one person in the food chain and expect to have a banquet at the end.)

More thoughts on e-publishing

Is knowledge ever free? Are there unseen workers laboring in those fields who are ripped off if we, as consumers, demand free and open access to scholarly journals? We need to be thinking through production as well as consumption in new and interesting ways.

The first day of panels was quite fascinating. Educators had the stage for panels dealing with problems and technologies in higher education, students & children, and scholarly production and publishing. How is public life different now for teens? What do internet technologies mean for students today? Schools need to radically change in order to prepare kids for college and life. (Citizenship was not discussed nor was the commercial nature of many of these online social networks). While educators were on some of the panels, many of them were composed of consultants or company representatives.

Adults are always trying to understand kids, and yet the answer is always just around the corner. The panels all carried a similar theme in the belief that supporting thoughtful changes in our education and social systems (not just investing in teachers but also guidance counselors, social workers and the like) are more important than limiting technology access in addressing critical issues in our society.