How to build free knowledge

Peter Eckersley, Finding a fair price for free knowledge, New Scientist, June 24, 2009. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)

... It makes no sense to limit and control access now we have technologies to give information to everyone. But it is also foolish to pretend we do not need incentives to help produce and publish that information. ...

[I]f we really want to end scarcity, we will have to build institutions that promote knowledge-sharing, while at the same time ensuring that there are incentives for creative and technical minds to contribute.

Science, and the universities that support it, is the grandest example of a system that has evolved to promote the abundance of knowledge. Universities offer incentives in the form of tenure, promotion and prestige to researchers who can discover and share the information which their peers consider most valuable. ...

Take the open access movement, which has campaigned to ensure that scientific articles are freely available to the public ... Within a decade or two, it is safe to say that all scientific literature will be online, free and searchable. Journal publishers will still be paid, but at a different point in the chain.

Outside the universities we have some even more remarkable developments. Fifteen years ago, who would have predicted that teenagers would be allowed to edit the world's primary reference source from their homes? ...

It's time to recognise that when we build institutions to promote the abundance of knowledge, everybody wins. When it comes to knowledge, you can never have too much of a good thing.