learning: March 2008 Archives

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1989, urged users to remember that information on the internet can be found by people who were never intended to access it. He told the current generation of social networking users to imagine their grandchildren reading the entries. 

Sir Tim said, “Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it’s all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well. 

“The danger is when you put something into a public space in order to share it with a few friends and in fact you’ve forgotten that it’s actually a public space or that the list of friends is huge or that some of them can’t be trusted not to put it somewhere else.”

Your dismay might turn to anger when you realize that you paid for this research. Through the National Institutes of Health alone, American taxpayers funnel more than $28 billion annually into medical research. That's leaving aside the billions more in public spending on state universities or the tax exemptions granted for gifts to private campuses. 

American institutions of higher education are knowledge machines of unprecedented fecundity, but much of the knowledge they produce is locked up in high-priced scholarly journals that most people can't easily get. Citizens thus find themselves in the position of paying for research and then paying again to buy it back from academic journals whose prices have been spiraling upward. Library Journal says that U.S. journal prices rose 9% last year alone. The average chemistry-journal subscription, to cite a single egregious example, was $3,429 for one year.