post gutenberg galaxy

This is a link to an essay by Stevan Harnad titled "Post Gutenberg Galaxy: The fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge".

Who is Stevan Harnad, and what kind of psychedelic essay is this, you may ask?

Harnad is a cognitive scientist and can be considered the father of the Open-Access Movement, a movement that evangelizes the free publication and free distribution of academic writings; something akin to the Free Software movement, but focusing on academic output instead of computer software. As a matter of fact, Harnad is sometimes likened to Richard Stallman. In the essay linked above he presents his vision that the free flow of academic knowledge, empowered and accelerated by the modern electronic communication technology, and the global network, will result to a revolution in the way knowledge is produced. This is what he calls the "fourth revolution" (the previous three being: speech, writing, and typography).

In 1994, Harnad published a subversive proposal (Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing), presenting methods that can be used to hasten the arrival of the day when esoteric, peer-reviewed, electronic publishing becomes ubiquitous. From this proposal is the quote that follows:

We have heard many sanguine predictions about the demise of paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a long way off. This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day. It is applicable only to ESOTERIC (non-trade, no-market) scientific and scholarly publication (but that is the lion's share of the academic corpus anyway), namely, that body of work for which the author does not and never has expected to SELL the words. The scholarly author wants only to PUBLISH them, that is, to reach the eyes and minds of peers, fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one another's contributions in that cumulative, collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry. For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications entered into the Faustian bargain of allowing a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership, for that was the only way they could make their work public at all during the age when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) was their only option.

Source: lwn