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