More misunderstanding

Ehsan Masood, The cost of freedom in the digital age, openDemocracy, October 3, 2006.  Excerpt:

As Caroline Michel of the William Morris literary "talent and literary agency" in London said at the [September 29] launch of [Rosemary Bechler's] Unbounded Freedom, there is as yet no agreed creative-commons model for content production, far less one which adequately rewards an author, inventor or innovator. Indeed, the opposite of this is the core principle of open-access publishing; instead of being rewarded, an author or a scientist is required to have to pay to have his or her ideas disseminated....

Free dissemination systems such as open access and creative commons are good and should be supported. The most excluded in society will benefit from not having to pay. But creative commons is not the right alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators.

Comments.

1. Caroline Michel is uninformed.  She's clearly thinking of open-access journals that charge author-side fees.  But she's unaware (1) that the majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees at all, (2) that when fees are charged, they are usually paid by funders or employers, not by authors, and (3) that open-access archiving, like publishing in the majority of OA journals, costs authors nothing.
2. Masood seems unaware that scientists and scholars are not paid for their journal articles and write for impact, not for money.  Musicians and movie-makers may need a financial reward system to motivate their creative production (I have no opinion on that), but for 350 years, since the launch of the first scientific journals, researchers have not.