K.A. Wallace writes an eloquent analysis of the conflict emerging in academia: control of content isn't limited to commercial endeavors. The halls of "learning" are equally inundated with the dogma of control and old world paradigms of content ownership that have nothing to do with education.
Below is an excerpt and the entire work that Wallace composes is located here.
"The rapidly developing digital publishing world is driven by an
underlying tension between economic interests in controling access to
digital products and the distributive logic of interlinked digital
media. This tension has been playing itself out in well-known ways in
the music and entertainment industry, the
Writer’s Guild of America strike
being one of the most recent incidents. The entertainment industry and,
in the academic sector, the hard sciences have gotten the most
attention, but humanities and social science scholars need to recognize
that though there is less money and less cyberinfrastructure in place,
they have professional interests to protect, as do institutions such as
universities and scholarly professional organizations. Scholarly and
research communities in the humanities and soft social sciences are
well behind their peers in the hard sciences on open access and digital
publishing in general. Because peer-reviewed scholarship in the
humanities and social sciences is as much a public good as is research
in the hard sciences, academic institutions and authors, particularly
those in the humanities and social sciences who have not been paying
attention to the shifts in the digital publishing landscape, need to
both take control of how their works are published and distributed and
become much more actively involved in setting the terms for the digital
publishing world."
