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But If You Connected Information and Turned It into Knowledge, That Would Be Cheating

Sep 05, 2007

In an essay published in the Financial Times, James Boyle, writes about how science has resisted the advances brought by the World Wide Web to a host of other fields -- "commerce, social networking, pornography" -- and says that journal publication has a lot to do with this. A law professor at Duke and co-founder of Science Commons, Boyle writes:

The greatest irony, though, is this. The world wide web was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. ... With the virtues of an open Web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserv or Minitel and very little like a World Wide Web for science.

 

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