[I was recently reading] Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History....Roughly 100 pages into it, I came across an interesting chapter detailing which books/epistles/etc. are counted as scripture, and which are not.
The fascinating part of this is the role that authority plays in making such decisions. For instance, I've read a fair amount in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, as well as the New Testament Apocyrpha, but these are not considered "official" books of scripture. Centuries ago, a small group of experts determined what was official, and what was not....I appreciate the role of experts as well as the next person, but I'd rather trust in numbers, in open access. This is, I suppose, a Wisdom of Crowds-type argument. But really it's more a testament to my personal faith in openness. I think rubbish generally outs itself over time, as does truth, scientific or otherwise. Give enough people access, and good things will prove themselves good, and bad will prove themselves bad....Access is critical, both to those who look and to those who don't. As I've written before, the option of source code access in open source serves as a useful surrogate for actual exercise of that choice, just as an open process for choosing scripture over apocrypha, open voting, open/free market economies, etc. provide for (or, at worst, enable) better informed, optimal results.
No decision is best made blindly. No product is best defined, designed, and implemented in an information/feedback vacuum. Opening up source code means customers can place greater trust in the software they use even if they never read a single line of code, precisely because others can exercise this choice in their stead.
I need to spend more time thinking about how to implement this openness in one's business model. I'm hoping that you, along with I, will spend a great deal of time working this out in 2006.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/01/2006 03:47:00 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.
