Cory Doctorow
Image by cindiann via Flickr

Image by cindiann via Flickr

MIT makes research available on the web
Mon, Mar 23, 2009
Esteemed school joins others in advocating open access to research as the price of journals rises
By Dennis Carter, Assistant Editor

In smaller, less confident universities there still seems to be a misguided belief that holding onto new knowledge and metering its release through relatively exclusive, and often overpriced, academic journals somehow lends prestige to the organisation. Moves like this by MIT reveal those others for what they are – petty bureaucracies festering in unhealthy insecurity.

Cory Doctorow discusses some of the problems with framing knowledge as property and proclaims “You Can’t Own Knowledge“in his article of the same title. The Creative Commons movement, the sharism approach, copyleft have all begun to challenge the way we frame knowledge and the system that priveleged the ones who could afford the access to new knowledge. This is, to my small mind, a good thing. A system that excludes the majority from engaging with new information is a system destined to suffer from inbreeding.

All kudos to MIT and those that forged the way before them for having the confidence, and corporate intelligence to shed the limiting practices of elite publishing and getting new knowledge into circulation more quickly where its relevance can be tested and incorporated in current practice.

I predict that this will also begin to shift expectations about higher degree research…

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