Slashdot Mirror
George Soros Funds Open-Publishing Software
blair1q writes "BBC has a story reporting that George Soros and his Open Society Institute are funding "open access" media for scientific publishing. These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide information to researchers whose institutions can't afford to subscribe to large numbers of overpriced periodicals. Part of the funding will go to improve the open-access enabling EPrints software, which is under GPL."
Sort of like how Slashdot competes with the quasi-monopolies held by the magazine industry in order to provide information to geeks who can't afford to buy magazines that check their facts, etc. :-)
Scientific journals serve a purpose, despite the rants by frustrated pseudoscientists who can't get their work published. Though the system may not work perfectly, at least they make some attempt to review articles and weed out the crap. Words like "free" and "open" and "no censorship" are not necessarily good for science, because it really just means "hey! we'll publish your manifestoes on how the world *really* works, even if those self-proclaimed scientist types keep telling you to talk to a psychologist..."
Technical Writer?
"They say that researchers write and review papers for free, so the journals should not charge to read them."
/. get than Yahoo! Internet magazine or Wired?? I would imagine a lot more...
I find it interesting that areas other than programming are showing signs of the opensource movement. I have to wonder though, would it not be a cheaper endevour to combat established commercial publications with relevant, fresh, quailty content on a new website??
How many more readers does
Just my $.02
Information wants to be free.
As a grad student, I would love for this happen...as long as standards don't fall the the wayside. If Soros could get free journals with peer review, I'd support it with every ounce of my body. My university pays up the nose for journals and every year I read about how some journals need to be cut to meet the budget.
In fact, I've often wondered why universities pay an outrageous institutional price for the journals, when an individual can pay a lower price (albeit still exorbitant).
This is one of the true monopolies I would love to see end.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
It's Open-Publishing Software or Open Access that Soros is investing?
And who in good will would think that Soros giving money is more important than the actual news that an open access system will be developed. I mean, so what is Soros? Could be Bill Gates, *the* important news for the Slashdot community is that there are people against paying for information and people who is making something against it, by providing it for free.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Is George trying to regain karma for having precipitated the collapse of the baht?
Dunno about you, but the last few major scientific releases have been first through a journal then to the world. Successful cloning, stem cell research, and most recently the artificial womb.
Right now, there's increasing pressure for scientists to close themselves off, mainly coming from their employers (companies).
What's happening to science is what happened to software. At first, the source was available, because the supplier didn't know if you could run the binaries and besides, you probably could help improve the code as well. Then, Ma Bell shut off the flow of source and caused the balkanization of Unices. After that, almost all software was binary for a particular platform.
Science started with open information sharing, and is perilously progressing towards a proprietarization of knowledge. Trade secrets are becoming more popular than patents because secrets are more protected. (Trade secrets are highly protected as long as no one else figures out how to do what you can do independantly, whereas patents are open to public inspection and expire. )
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Ah, if only we mere mortals could get George's ear for a few hours, and explain how he could actually profit by supporting open music distribution.
To wit:
- users must open an account at the music distribution site.
- users must keep a balance of >$50 in their account in order to continue purchasing music.
- music costs $0.50 per track.
- artists are paid when they collect $1000 in payments or once a month, whichever is less frequent, no interest paid on the account (rather, the distribution site keeps any interest the money earns).
- the distribution site skims 5% of the transaction.
- for an additional percentage, the site will support automatic payment distribution, such that everyone the musician owes money to gets a percentage of the take (rather than the musician having to do that accounting him/herself.)
I think this would be a moderately profitable business. The key to success is to not be greedy: the only thing keeping micropayments from working is greed.
And George has the bucks to fund the startup. He wouldn't make a shitload of profit, but it wouldn't be unprofitable. He'd have to do it out of a desire for legacy, not to increase his fortunes.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I see this news as a wonderful contrast to the open source movement. Science has always been "open source", with publishers demanding a reasonable payment for their efforts of propogating that knowledge. Free speech not Free beer. Now the movement is for free propogation of that information at little or no cost. Free beer for the scientific community.
On the other hand open source and FSF has it's roots in free beer and free speech, and is now only going towards changing for that beer. I think both models are legitamate and should function with each other. Who else is going to edit that Nature or Science journal if you dont pay them? But then again there will always be people who do it for the love of the code, or in this case the research
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
Hmmm, according to that Salon article, Bill got here 4 years before he was "born". This could explain a lot...
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
I wish they could somehow share this info between open and free universities and students and somehow block all those universities that don't share info. They should have to obtain/create their own info, if they're going to sell it.
Y'know, this guy is a preeminent capitalist. He made his billions (mostly without any moral ambiguities) and has gone on to change the world in positive ways. His generosity and nobility are prime examples of why the "society benefits from selfishness" is such a load of crapola. Soros did it for himself, now he's doing it for others. *That* is a capitalist, my friends.
Obviously I am not the Ayn Rand fan I once was.
Plus I think the that the point they make, saying: is quite valid. Didn't the NYTimes have to remove a bunch of content from their (paid subscription) database because the people who submitted the articles still had the copyrights, etc? I know those were editorial pieces, and that when you submit journal articles, you give up the copyright, (pretty sure about that part) but isn't the principle of the thing the same?
I really like this part : Thats music to my ears.
I think that some people are missing the whole point of the way the research journal system is setup today. The journals cost a lot of money to get.... esp the paper versions. But...the journal companies ahve a LOT of overhead to deal with. Mainly coordinating the review process that gives any jounral its credibility. Others in the given scientific field have to read and review the papers before they are deemed ready for publishing.... as well as several copy editors and others employed by the actual jounral. This is all to ensure validity of the science and quality of the paper. ALong with that, people publish in a given journal because of its reputation. Science or Nature being pretty much cream of the crop work.... then moving on to journals like Proc. National Academy of Sciences, Cell, J of Bacteriology, then down to the level of journals and so on. Where you publish becomes a reflection of the quality of work that you do. Some institutions even *require* faculty to publish so many papers in a given set of journals in order to be eligible for full professorship. So, this system seems great... but I think it is going to be very difficult to get people using it in large numbers.
It's interesting news, but I can't help feeling that the more interesting question is still out there waiting for an answer...
What about copyleft(ish) licenses for the non-software world?
From the article: "The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment," reads the declaration.
It calls for "free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose".
Nothing in there about modification and redistribution.
Could modification rights work for non-software copyrightable content? I don't know.
But the idea that it could be useful doesn't seem that crazy.
- Maybe you made a wonderful map of a region, but you want to leave open the chance that others will improve on specific areas and pass the whole thing along. (and you're willing to take the risk that they botch the whole thing up)
- Maybe you don't mind if people take your song, add an extra verse, (or change a person's name), and pass it on. (and you're willing to take the risk that some bozo will fill that verse with beowulf clusters and profanity)
- Maybe you've made a simple customized textbook and you'd be pleased as punch if people drop out the half where you didn't really know what you were talking about and replace it with something really informative. (and you're willing to take the chance that they drop out the half where you did really know what you were talking about and leave the junk half).
To me, it seems as though copyleft makes as much sense in the non-software world as it does the software world.
Maybe the problem is just that in the non-software world giving away these freedoms is harder to take. (A comment I _know_ is going to come back to haunt me, since as a non-programmer I have no personal idea at all how hard it is to relinquish control... I'm just talking. er, typing.)
(Or, alternatively, I suppose it could just be that in software the functional aspect of code is a built-in bozo filter for ill-conceived changes? You think?)
First, reviewing or editting an article for a journal should get you a free copy of a similiarly priced journal. Often scientists review articles that are not in their field of expertise in order to maintain impartiality, so getting a copy of the journal that the article you reviewed is in isn't always worthwhile.
Second, the "Open Access" movement should organize it's own journals. These journals could be formed at any tiem for free by anyone. The journal would mainly consist of a review board that reviews articles. If the review board considers an article to be of a high enough quality and within a certain subject area then the review board can mark the article as being "included" in said journal. This way, while anyone can still publish a paper by uploading it or whatever, people can filter searches by particular journals, giving them a quick way to weed out lots of crap.
For those of you who are wondering about who pays the review board for their time have stumbled onto the problem that faces the open access movement. You need a lot of very smart people to review enough papers to make up good journals, and those very smart people quite often have better things to do with their time.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
I worked for a company that was "attacked by" George. The company I worked for decided to take a "poison pill" rather than let Soros take over. In the end the BoD did exactly what Soros threatened to do, i.e. sell off most of the company that was unprofitable, but they took all the profits instead of George. I suspect that the stock holders of the company I worked for would have been much better off with Soros at the helm than our weasel CEO/BoD. BTW the CEO we had was also on the BoD of Enron. Surprise, surprise. Guess the company and CEO and win!!!
To let people know the costs of some of these journals, here are a couple of sites to look at.
First, a general overview of costs in the mid-90s (done in 2000, so just imagine how expensive they are now!) can be found here.
A more recent review of chemistry journals can be found here. It is amazing to think that some of these journals cost ~$4.50 a page (neuroscience journals are even more expensive!).
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
Problem is that number of publications says nothing about quality.
I have not read a journal publication in the journal for at least five years. I generally read articles as pre-publication preprints or from the author's web site. If the only publication is in dead tree form it might as well not exist in my field.
The problem that online journals have faced is that it takes some time for an online journal to establish prestige and hence attract the type of publication that generates prestige.
Another problem has been that the HTML browser folk were never interested in implementing the HTML math markup which has left scientific publication to pdf form which is pretty useless as a dialogue medium. I can't cut and paste and equation from pdf to mathematica as MathML would allow.
What I would like to see is the rise of different modes of academic publishing that take advantage of the electronic mode. I would like to see enterprises that are structured in the manner of a dictionary or encyclopeadia, providing a systematic and structured description of the state of the art in a particular field as a whole.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Where?
One professional society I belong to had a break-away journal promising "all the efficiencies of modern technology"- cheap, quick, etc. However, they never got a critical mass of scientists to submit articles. There's a catch-22 problem: if you dont have a quality body of people submitting articles you dont have a quality journal; if you dont have a quality journal you dont have people submitting articles. The journal failed after a couple years due to lack of quaity submissions.
Its not like people haven't thought of cheap web publishing before. Many thought they could start their own maverick journals for "almost nothing" on the web. But the human intertia of buy-in can be tremendous.
The biggest problem I see with this proposal is that the creators of this effort have neglected to give the journals enough credit for the services they do provide: quality controll and topic selection.
A person who reads Journal of Academic Subject X does so partially because that journal has cultivated a reputation for quality in their field. Researchers are busy people, and they don't want to read every article by every crackpot out there. They want to keep current on the groundbreaking research and be aware of the new work that might apply to their own.
In other words, it's probably not enough to just 'get a critical mass' of work, especially if the critical mass is composed entirely of articles rejected for publication by journals. It's also not enough to just have a lot of information available - there must be some way of determining the quality of the work as well.
It seems to me what these guys really need, more than anything, is some sort of peer review process, similar to the moderation process here, that could help to filter out the bad stuff, make the truly groundbreaking work visible, and make sure that articles are categorized correctly. This would be an affordable way of providing the services that the editors of these journals normally provide while keeping the advantages that come with having a large electronic archive.
He has been one of the major backers of the initiatives that support medical marijuana in several western states. Anyone who does anything real against the war on drugs is fine by me.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
> Information wants to be free.
So does my Johnson!
You quote a cost of $20 to $50 per page for typesetting. In my experience (physics journals), there is a required electronic format (usually TeX), and the journal provides templates. I can see the article exactly as it will appear in the journal before I send it to the journal. The writer does the typesetting. I have heard the claim of typesetting costs before, but it sounds false to me. Is this the case in other disciplines?
Look inside the front cover of a journal to see the cost of a subscription. Where does the money go? It's not to the writers, the editors, or the reviewers. I claim that it is not to the typesetters. Furthermore, the page costs (paid by the writer, and often between $50 and $100 per page) are supposed to cover the typesetting costs. Why do they cost so much money?
Free access to information is long overdue.
I read more than the article and discovered this page: EPrints 2.0 Documentation - Introduction
At the bottom it read:
eprints.org Webmaster - Last Modified 1st January 1970, 1:00 amA 2.0 and than this ? I dont know ...
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
In a surprising "coincidence" version 2.0 of the eprints archive software has just been released by us monkeys at the University of Southampton working for Stevan Harnad (who proposed self archiving).
The software is pretty generic, it does research papers by default but can be configured *lots*. And it's designed to add your own scripts and stuff (perl).
At one end of the spectrum (what it's funded to do) it generates archives of research papers, although you could practically implement mp3.com with it (and a huge server or two).
Links of interest:
EPrints Home: http://www.eprints.org/
Demo Archive: http://demoprints.eprints.org/
At first I thought 'another win for open source' and this is a very important issue. When I followed some links I found that the analysis of a questionaire that had been conducted mentioned Microsoft Excel functions, mean and std. dev. being used. Sigh, I guess they aren't all that 'open source' users as one would think.
zenray
translates to
These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide publication credits to researchers whose articles aren't good enough to be published in normal periodicals
-- the most controversial site on the Web
What makes Soros different, how he stands aside from the other giants is in his thoughtful, abstract approach to the mechanisms of profit, and the rise and fall of economies.
His "public works" have taken place throughout his career, not merely as an afterthought. He appears to be quite intelligent, and seems to surround himself with intelligent, critical advisors. Most of his oddball adventures and forays in Europe have been profitable, or at least, had the intention of bringing back some compensation, but there seems to be a broader plan at work.
A naive western observer might see the Hand of Soros offering charity and kindness to a world that desperately needs his help. The natives who've endured his schemes probably see him as a standard-model Ugly American, his interference in their culture and economies don't seem to be quite as welcome as advertised. He appears to regret (sincerely?) the harm he's caused, but his answer seems to be... try new schemes. He quite baldly treats Economics as an Experimental and not a Theoretical science. He seems to take the broad perspective, in his field, that a Machievelli took in the realm of Renaissance politics, though he's had far more success.
I suspect history will look on him with more interest than his contemporaries do; he's one of the most influential single humans on Earth today, but tries to work stealthily and quietly. Whether they will approve or disapprove... ultimately depends on who gets to write those histories.
First, nothing begins if not opening
I've worked on journals for ACM, Kluwer/Academic and more. Where I work is where the prepress stuff is done, the actual building of the journal. Much more goes into these journals than picking submissions and throwing them all together. We have on staff editors who oversee the journals work and status, proofreaders (some of you submitters have worse spelling than Taco...), art scanners, art editors and coders/typesetters. I can see why you are angry at the cost of having your work printed, but even with typesetting done in India (New Delhi facility) we still make little over cost. Its just a fact of life that getting this all together, XML or Quark set, art edited and set, PDFs made and printed, and finally shipped and distributed, has a cost.
Peace, Love, Games
Trying to follow the links can be tedious, but the structure is interesting (snippets cut and pasted from the various websites).
George Soros funds a network of foundations. Among them, Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF) assists independent news organizations working in difficult economic and political climates. Of which Center for Advanced Media-Prague (C@MP) has been bringing new-media concepts and solutions to independent news organizations worldwide since 1998
Camp is developing and diffusing cost-effective, open-source solutions to independent media through its CAMPWARE initiative. Which brings us to another open source ongoing development project: CAMPSITE, an automated web-publishing environment for news media.
The only way the Internet can really have an impact on the direction of science is not by making publishing cheaper or by freely distributing papers, but by loosening the controls of the peer review system.
:0
The peer review process as it has operated throughout the last few hundred years is on record as being the biggest stumbling block to scientific advancement. Note how many breakthroughs were vociferously opposed by those scientists with recognition, i.e. those that guided and made it through the peer review process of the Sciences and Natures of their time.
Well, what is the alternative you ask. Anarchy? Race to the LCD? No. Formatting standards, global namespaces, meta-data (including meta-data for reviews and comments on papers), and collaborative filtering working together can act to allow for a decentralized method of filtering and promoting various theories.
If the viewpoints of scientists were made public knowledge through a system of ratings and reviews of papers, it is even feasible that an objective measure of rating accuracy could be assessed over time -- this IS science after all, and theories are eventually proven right or wrong. Then, given tight enough feedback loops, the old guard might not even have to die off before being written off.
Just some thoughts...
I'd laugh if it didn't hurt so much. :(
Originally, the Internet was the medium that made science available to anyone in the world. That's what bulliten boards and web 'docs' were all about. Then Billy Gates came along and said:" you're all fools! You should be making money! That's what software is for. "
Thanks Bill.
I always wondered where that £4 billion profit from the ERM crisis was being spent :)
This guy show exactly what type of people should have money.
Helping money hungry idiots like Bill Gates make more money is exaclty what YOU do wrong every day.
So no one should be able to comment to anyone articles so some liberal does not get offended? Write your own stories do not criticize, I got it. Now that I reworded your statement and deliberalized it, it sounds alot like something a fascist would say, they despise criticism.
Spot on except for one thing. Liberalism is dead. Liberals do not exist. Michael Dukakis was the last one. Please refer to so-called "liberals" as to what they really are: neo-fascits.
I'm going to take a moment to explain how publishing will work in the future.
There will be no publishing houses such as O'Reilly, Addison Wesley, Houghton Mifflin, etc.
All around the country, in malls, airports, bookstores, kinkos, schools, libraries, etc there will be print on demand machines. Next to the print on demand machines will be kiosks (running Linux of course) that allow you to browse books, submit payment, and print them.
There will be two costs. The cost of the content, and the cost to have it printed. Thus, a kinkos, with it's power to buy lots of paper, might charge 4.00 to have a book printed. The content charge might by 2.00. Therefore the book costs 6.00.
An airport, not being a large paper purchaser, might have to charge more for the print costs so its fees might be 4.50. They might also charge a premium because of the captive audience. Likewise, the authors might charge 2.50 because they know that people in airports are desperate and willing to pay more. Total cost is 7.00.
Of course, some of these places could offer extra services, such as special covers, cover art, different paper options, delivery to a home address, etc.
The reason why there will be no publishers is because authors will work with freelance editors and copy-writers. Job boards on the Internet will allow these groups to hook up in ad-hoc ways to find work and get books written. Then they subscribe these books to a distribution system.
This same thing will happen with music, in whatever format you want, but I'll stick to CDs.
Music artists will work with freelance sound engineers and production people who have studio space and equipment, or who can rent such space. They will sell the content on the web, and in kiosks. There cash outlay will be minimal, and they will be able to reach any size audience. These kiosks will burn CDs for the consumer, or the web based consumers will recieve files (and freesoftware) to burn the CD's themselves, or keep them in digital form.
This change in music, and book publishing will occur for many reasons. Two of which are:
1) Reduce costs, increase profits. With no brick and mortars, or large company overhead, sales people, marketing (you could freelance this too), costs are lower.
2) Reach even the smallest audience. I might be a musician of really uncommon music. My world-wde audience might be 20,000. A record company/label woudln't sign me because my economies of scale don't scale. But, in the freelance system I might sell my content for 5.00 each. That is 100,000 per year if I produce each year. Take out the fees for the sound engineers time and whomever else helped me, I might make between 40-70k. Hardly starving artist.
I don't mind these journals making a profit. But after an article is ~10 years old the content should go to the public domain, especially since this is where the money for the research usually comes from.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Speaking of checking your facts, the first sentence on the eprints.org site says:
"Welcome to eprints.org, dedicated to the freeing of the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving."
Refereed research doesn't involve guys with stripy shirts. It means knowledgeable scientists who "check their facts". See, the journals are over priced because of market forces involved in publishing a small number of journals that can't generate much advertising revenue. NOT because they hire guys to check the facts. An efficient online distribution and archiving scheme could be more than funded by the $50-$200 submission fees charged by most journals.
Guess YOUR ranting manefesto WON'T get published on eprint.org.
Or does Georgie boy hold out for only the highest returns?
Here's a thought. Academic journals cost a fortune because they've got 100 times the content of Newsweek and 1/100th of the subscribership base. The subscriber-to-verifier ratios too damn low to keep them reasonably priced. They're not overpriced because there's some Hearst somewhere riding high on the hog off subscriptions to the Okipenoki Journal of Internal Medicine - its just supply and demand.
If you introduce a successful, free journal, you'll only further undermine that market. Now I don't know about you, but I'd rather see the error costs manifesting themselves as a few bright folks not getting published rather than a couple dozen fruitcakes pushing theories about how the government is leasing Area 51 to Martians.
It sounds like Soros would substitute peer review (not much sh*t, but good sh*t) with Peer-2-Peer review (not good sh*t, but alotta sh*t). I'm not sure this is the trade-off we want to make.
The journal system may suck - but maybe that means we should be further subsidizing the market, rather than trying to explode it.
It may be cold, but at least it's clear.
Just let me know and I'll give him a call (great uncle of mine.) Thats all I've got to say, have a nice day :)
Contain my voice. Place my user into your foe list.
Soros is quite an interesting character/organization... we need more of these people.
--
If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
Will it be Open Soros?
I don't know if you have such a position (or if one would call it exactly a "Fellow"), but I'd like to be a sort-of Soros Fellow based around New York City who is also an Information Technology staff member. Essentially, I'd like to wander around the Open Society Institute (as well as the larger Soros Foundations Network) and create and deploy "open source" technology for knowledge management and digital libraries (including open content) to help other Soros Foundations Network staff do their jobs better, while at the same time make available that technology outside the Soros Foundations Network under open source licenses (and integrate back in community generated improvements as well). I'd naturally be happy to instead be a more conventional Soros Fellow who just works on some Digital Library projects of my own design (I have a couple in mind) but I think helping with Soros Foundations Network's immediate knowledge management needs (or at least the subset shared by others) would serve as inspiration to create all sorts of wonderful things over the long term, which other foundations and other individuals might find of great usefulness -- and the hope is perhaps they might even improve on them a little in the process and share those improvements back to us.
While I know any foundation would not match private sector pay, what would interest me most in working with the Soros Foundations Network and get my full-time (plus some) devotion to it is if my employment agreement ensured all software I developed for the foundation could be released under an open source license of my choice or into the public domain. Also, I'd want to talk about open content licensing issues in regards to any large work undertaken in the digital library space. That would help me weave together various threads of my life into a whole cloth. Currently I work for six to eighteen months at a time doing proprietary work for clients, and then take some time to work on my own projects. In both cases I end up a little too isolated for being the most productive I could be.
Here is my perspective on the issues of our day and what I think I can help with at the foundation. You may find this of interest even if we do not work together in the future.
Due to continuing exponential growth of computer chip manufacturing capability (predicted by Moore's law), computers are predicted to be a million times bigger in capacity, faster in speed, or smaller in size (pick one at a time for a constant price) within the next couple of decades. However, exponential growth in technological capacity is also occurring in a variety of fields besides computing. Technologies for power generation, CAD/CAM, materials, nanotechnology, communications, positioning, robotics, artificial intelligence, transportation, biotechnology, and collaboration are all increasing on their own exponential curves. That growth is also interacting with the exponential changes in computing and the other fields in a synergetic way. Cars that drive themselves are just one example of a technology around the corner that will change the face of society -- something only made possible by several of these trends coming together. We are heading for an age of abundance (although the future is still far from assured given continuing risks from arms races in part driven also by technological imperatives). Raymond Kurzweil's latest web site makes the issues clear: http://www.kurzweilai.net/ And it also makes clear how there are both opportunities and dangers: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=2
When I audited a course in Soviet Politics [snipped] around 1984, one idea bounced around was that because the Soviet Union was highly centralized, if they did decide to switch to a democratic capitalist model, they could do it overnight. Yet, nothing was further from the truth when Gorbachev actually started Perestroika a few years later -- because old ways of doing things, old habits, old customs, old relationships, and old world views were slow to change. Now, fifteen years after the initiation of Perestroika, that area and its economy is still in disarray, and the people living there as well as their environment have suffered greatly as a result.
The same may well be true of Western society as we transition into this age of abundance made possible by all this technological advancement. In the age of the internet, many of the old competitive ways of doing things such as obtaining local benefits while passing on external costs no longer make much sense (if they ever did), yet the new ways are still forming, like the chaordic vision of organization advocated by Dee Hock. http://www.chaordic.org/ As we move into this age, "gift" economies may take center stage, such as the gift economy behind Linux and much of the interesting content on the internet. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbroo k/
The realization is still slow to dawn that we as a society now know
enough and have enough potential wealth to have plenty of each of
nature, technology and society for everyone. Perhaps that was always
true and we had just forgotten it.
Buckminster Fuller http://www.bfi.org/ brought this issue up decades ago as "Design Science", but such ideas are at odds with a lifetime of conditioning to believe in an economy of scarcity, and so they move very slowly. People are still caught in thinking we must choose between countryside, gadgetry, or humanity. We can have all of these things -- if we use the knowledge we already possess in a collaborative way to reconcile issues of self interest with the greater good through innovative practices. Perhaps not all conflicts can be resolved, but many of the basic life-support ones about adequate water, minimal food, clean air, decent shelter, livable communities, conserved biodiversity, and innovative education can. To do so requires that we include this upcoming transition to an age of abundance in our thinking about economic policy, foreign affairs, and domestic political issues. It also requires preserving the digital commons in terms of free access to basic information about the essentials of life (and how to make them). The OSCOMAK project http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak was a step in that direction, but I have not had enough time to develop it. I would hope I could continue to pursue it in some way in conjunction with the Soros Foundations Network, since for example such information might help developing nations bootstrap their economies.
What excites me about working with the Soros Foundations Network is that I would be involved with people who care about such things, and we could all be working to make similar things happen together, all made possible by far-sighted gifts from George Soros.
As the Soros Foundations Network moves forward, I would like to play a role helping articulate a vision and strategy that balances these three aspects (nature, technology, society) amidst the upcoming potential of prosperity made possible by advanced information systems and other products of the exponential growth of technology. I would also like to help create the information systems that the foundations network itself uses for internal communications, internal education, and external communications. These systems could be built using an open source collaborative model allowing the Soros Foundations Network's own needs for knowledge management to create another gift for humanity in terms of freely available tools for collaboration and knowledge management, leveraging the work of existing collaborative communities where possible, and adding to them where there are special needs.
For example, why shouldn't each on-the-go Soros Foundations Network staffer have (if they desire) a belt-worn wearable computer and tri-band cell phone to keep them in touch with the network's digital library from anywhere in the world? The hardware exists pretty much off-the-shelf for this http://www.xybernaut.com/ and will only continue to get better. The software is still something to be wrestled with though, and that is a challenge I would relish. Similarly, why shouldn't the Soros Foundations Network have a situation room with hundreds of display screens monitoring world issues, the progress of grants, and the initiatives of other foundations? Again, the relatively affordable hardware for such a room exists now off-the-shelf -- the software is the main issue. http://www.unigraf.fi/PAGES/multiscr/videowall.htm
These are the sorts of things I would like to create for the Soros
Foundations Network and, if done primarily as open source, for the
world.
The internet also makes possible a fine grained sort of collaboration which was never practical before (such as through using threaded email lists or discussion sites like http://www.slashdot.org/ ). Such collaborations might help in advancing the Open Society Institute's mission. Yet such collaborations produce new legal issues (or, more correctly, put new twists on old ones). There is a related paper my wife and I wrote that talks about clear licensing as a way to promote collaboration which I will be presenting for the SSI Conference on Space Manufacturing in Princeton the beginning of next week. I'd be happy to send a copy after the conference is over if it is of any interest. It touches on some of the broader non-technical issues that directly effect how IT can be used for the common good.
Unfortunately, it seems many non-profits (including schools) see the internet as a potential profit center for selling information (whether that is realistic is a different issue). To that end they prevent others from making derived works from their materials (as a byproduct of restricting copying to create artificial scarcity), which in turn limits fine-grained collaboration to improve technical artifacts. So, there is much to be worked through here in terms of the bigger picture.
While large corporations can play a role in developing such technology (just wave money in front of them), they aren't exactly going to be out front cheer leading and inventing the open source information tools an open society needs (since there are many other short-term profitable things they can focus on, typically involving financing by people with proprietary interests in information management). Yet, as individuals, many of the people in such organizations would love to work on such projects and could make convincing pitches to management if given half a chance and a shred of economic justification. And many other individuals outside such organizations will give freely of their spare time to help make such efforts happen.
Leading by example is almost always a good idea. As Alan Kay said, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it". If we are to have an open society, we need to invent open technology to go with it. Somebody has to make that technology. This is an area the Soros Foundations Network can play a leadership role while at the same time helping achieve its other goals through open source efforts.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm sorry, but I used to work for Science and the overhead was NOT tied up managing the review process, which has been automated at this point. Publishing a magazine requires alot of overhead costs, mostly in the form of salary. The folks at AAAS, which publishes Science, are well compensated, especially the management.
Open publishing is something that the big scientific publishers are deathly afraid of. It's a viable concept as long as there is some kind of peer review involved. The crucial consideration for open published journals is to make sure that the scientists and writers involved will feel assured that there publication in the open journal will support their vitas. If it helps them get tenure, they'll be for it. If not, it's a waste of time.