How Elsevier bought control of Scientific Knowledge

For those who, like me a short while ago, have no idea who Elsevier is, they are the company which managed to get control of most of the most potentially lucrative scholarly publications and then milk that into extorting huge amounts of money from universities. I had no idea that they existed, let alone that they did this, but I found the account of the principles that let them achieve this goal, the techniques they used to do this, and how this ties in to the history of both science and intellectual property utterly fascinating.

The article itself is [link|http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html|In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing]. (For those who do not know, Henry Oldenburg was the man who realized that academics needed a way to establish ownership of ideas and dreamed up the first modern academic journal to assist them in doing so.)

This came up on the Free Software Business list, where someone quoted from that article Bradford's law on the distribution of interesting information among scientific journals. If that principle is correct and appropriately generalizable, then the observations that led to belief in Metcalfe's law (that the value in a network scales as the square of its size) notwithstanding, then the total potential value in a large network is proportional to n*log(n). With the individual potential value per person being proportional to log(n), and the constant being strongy dependent on how much that person is inclined towards being a generalist. (For a detailed explanation of why see my [link|http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?mss:7023:200201:eobfphmhokdadnnpgnfk|relevant post] to the list.)

Anyways the original article is a bit long, but very interesting to me. And it leads to some disturbing speculations about what Google may be able to accomplish with their information about the knowledge dynamics of the Internet...

Cheers,
Ben

demonstrating how near-to the reptile brain is lodged the mercantile sub-brain. Oil cartels? Hell, let's make everybody pay to find out the At. Wt. of Element 118, recently said to have been created for a few pSec. at LBL..

And this all has occurred quite before the similar mindset spawned the DMCA and other modern bizness wet dreams. (I read rather rapidly and have to go back for more of the delicious prose.)

This also fits another piece into the puzzle wherein, my 'multi-lingual scholar' friend spent a year in Moscow, working for Maik-NAUKA, the Russian ~ of the Academy of Sciences. While editing, translating for them, she also discovered a certain amount of the sleaze factor implicit in this article. I merely presumed that such an attitude was an artifact of the nascent Russian chaos (this was back in '92 or so). Hah! - latecomers.

Thanks for some more good writing. Fascinating discussion of the elements of 'intellectual property' / what the first printers hoped that might mean, etc. Hackneyed or no, it does seem that we are seeing such a paradigm shift - fortunately, after having had that defined for us. Just as clearly - the fate of any idea of an intellectual commons will depend upon how much attention is kept upon the Machiavellian manipulators, cut from the same slime-cloth as our local Beastworks. How to keep that spotlight periodically turned on, in an era of reduced attention-span (?)

{sheesh}. Can homo-sap ever break the terminal-greed habit?
(rhetorical question)

Ashton
Now if I could extract an Oxygen Tax \ufffd of merely a few micro-Euros/liter - by patenting the 2-s 2-p electron motions (reverse engineering becoming a Capital offense) ...

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