On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Christopher D. Green wrote:
> First, contrary to Stevan, I suspect that much of the third word will
> indeed be left behind by the increasing computerization of the first
> world. Although this may "drive demand" for electronics in the third
> world (note, however, I suspect the third world has far more pressing
> demands at present), it certainly won't provide the funds necessary to
> satisfy that demand. I don't see any obvious solution to that problem,
> however.
My main point was not about that, but about the fact that the 3rd world
WITH ITS CURRENT LIMITED ONLINE ACCESS HARDWARE (i.e., without the
hypothetical knock-on "drive demand" effects of freeing the research
literature online) will be incomparably better off as soon as the
research literature is freed online than it is now, when it has to rely
on its even narrower foreign-currency-limited paper-based access to the
refereed literature for its researchers.
So one can be (1) agnostic about whether the "drive demand" will indeed
suffice to redress the rest of the world's iniquities, yet (2) fully
committed to freeing the research literature online now.
[Chris agrees with the foregong, I know. The rest of his reply somewhat
misinterprets Alan, who wasn't arguing for holding back the freeing of
the online refereed literature until all iniquities are righted either;
he was only arguing for combining the two agendas, and it was this to
which I objected, for the self-archiving agenda (2) has face-validity
and can be accomplished immediately (with the help of generic open
archives <
http://www.eprints.org/software.html> and the legal copyright
proposed in this Forum by Professor Oppenheim), whereas righting the
rest of the iniquities (2) will be an uphill battle, and perhaps a long
one. No need to yoke the fate of (1) to (2) in any way, not even by
coalescing their rationales: their rationales are different. (And some
of the more radical notions of "knowledge democracy" are probably
intrinsically unrealistic, human nature being what it is.)]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT