Comment. Shirky's thesis is in his title, and it's exactly right. It matters for OA because every now and then someone seriously argues that price tags are a good solution to the problem of information overload. My response to that argument focuses on the OA context more than Shirky does, but presses the same general thesis. See for example this article from November 2004,
We want to remedy information overload, but we want to do it with smart tools that help us find the subset of information we need, not with crude policies that set off huge swaths of it, relevant and irrelevant alike, as too expensive.
Every time I raise the scaling argument, someone counters by saying that the [toll-access] system provides a welcome check on information overload. My brief reply: Information overload is a problem, but don't be satisfied with crude solutions when there are much better ones. I'd rather have access to all knowledge and use increasingly sophisticated tools for carving out the subset I need than to have access only to a shrinking subset of knowledge determined by what I can afford....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/19/2008 12:07:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
