miscellaneous factZ – The online home of Rufus Pollock

This Thursday (11th March) I’m speaking at the Forum Virium’s Open Up the City event in Helsinki.

This year their focus is on “open data, design, interfaces and innovation” and I’m speaking under the title “Open Data: What, Why, How?”.

I was recently asked to put together a short document outlining my main policy recommendations in the area of “innovation, creativity and IP”. Below is what I prepared.

General IP Policy

Recommendation: IP policy, and more generally innovation policy, should aim at the improvement of the overall welfare of UK society and citizens and not just at promoting innovation and creativity

Innovation is, of course, a major factor in the improvement of societal welfare — but not the only factor, access to the fruits of that innovation is also important.

IP rights are monopolies and such monopolies when over-extended do harm rather than good. The provision of IP rights must balance the promotion of innovation and creativity with the need for adequate access to the results of those efforts both by consumers and those who would seek to innovate and create by building upon them. A policy which aims purely at maximizing innovation, via the use of IP rights, will almost certainly be detrimental to societal welfare, since it will ignore the negative consequences of extending IP on access to innovation and knowledge. As such, IP policy is about having “enough, but not too much”.

This basic point is often overlooked. To help minimize the risk of this occurring in future it is suggested that this basic purpose — of promoting the welfare of UK citizens — be explicitly embedded within the goals of organisations and departments tasked with handling policies related to innovation and IP.

Recommendation: Move away from a focus on intellectual property to look at innovation and information policy more widely

IP rights are but one tool for promoting innovation and often a rather limited one. The focus should be on the general problem — promoting societal welfare through innovation and access to innovation — not on one particular solution to that problem.

Provision and Pricing of Public Section Information

Background

Public sector information (PSI) is information held by a public sector organisation, for example a government department or, more generally, any entity which is majority owned and/or controlled by government. Classic examples, of public sector information in most countries would include, among many others: geospatial data, meteorological information and official statistics.

While much of the data or information used in our society is supplied from outside the public sector, compared to other parts of the economy, the public sector plays an unusually prominent role. In many key areas, a public sector organization may be the only, or one among very few, sources of the particular information it provides (e.g. for geospatial and meteorological information). As such, the policies adopted regarding maintenance, access and re-use of PSI can have a very significant impact on the economy and society more widely.

Funding for public sector information can come from three basic sources: government, ‘updaters’ (those who update or register information) and ‘users’ (those who want to access and use it). Policy-makers control the funding model by setting charges to external groups (’updaters’ or ‘users’) and committing to make up any shortfall (or receive any surplus) that results. Much of the debate focuses on whether ‘users’ should pay charges sufficient to cover most costs (average cost pricing) or whether they should be given marginal cost access — which equates to free when the information is digital. However, this should not lead us to neglect the third source of funding via charges for ‘updates’.

Policy-makers must also to concern themselves with the regulatory structure in which public sector information holders operate. The need to provide government funding can raise major commitment questions while the fact that many public sector information holders are the sole source of the information they supply raise serious competition and efficiency issues.

Recommendation: Make digital, non-personal, upstream PSI available at marginal cost (zero)

The case for pricing public sector information to users at marginal cost (equal to zero for digital data) is very strong for a number of complementary reasons. First, the distortionary costs of average rather than marginal cost pricing are likely to be high. Second, the case for hard budget constraints to ensure efficient provision and induce innovative product development is weak. As such, digital upstream public sector information is best funded out of a combination of ‘updater’ fees and direct government contributions with users permitted free and open access. Appropriately managed and regulated, this model offers major societal benefits from increased provision and access to information-based services while imposing a very limited funding burden upon government.

Recommendation: Regulation should be transparent, independent and empowered. For every public sector information holder there should be a single, clear, source of regulatory authority and responsibility, and this ‘regulator’ should be largely independent of government.

This is essential if any pricing-policy is to work well and is especially important for marginal-cost pricing where the Government may be providing direct funding to the information holder. Policy-makers around the world have had substantial experience in recent years with designing these kinds of regulatory systems and this is, therefore, not an issue that should be especially difficult to address.

Copyright Term

Background

The optimal term of copyright has been a very live policy issue over the last decade. Recently, in the European Union, and especially in the UK, there has been much debate over whether to extend the term of copyright in sound recordings from its current 50 years.

The basic trade-off inherent in copyright is a simple one. On the one hand, increasing copyright yields benefits by stimulating the creation of new works but, on the other hand, it reduces access to existing works (the welfare ‘deadweight’ loss). Choosing the optimal term, that is the length of protection, presents these two countervailing forces particularly starkly. By extending the term of protection, the owners of copyrights receive revenue for a little longer. Anticipating this, creators of work which were nearly, but not quite, profitable under the existing term will now produce work, and this work will generate welfare for society both now and in the future. At the same time, the increase in term applies to all works including existing ones — those created under the term of copyright before extension. Extending term on these works prolongs the copyright monopoly and therefore reduces welfare by hindering access to, and reuse of, these works.

Recommendation: Reduce Copyright Term – And Certainly Do Not Extend It

Current copyright term is significantly over-extended. Calculations performed in the course of my own work indicate that optimal copyright term is likely around 15 years and almost certainly below 40 (the breadth of the estimates here are a direct reflection of the existing data limitations but this upper bound is still (far) below existing terms).

Even a simple present-value calculation would indicate that the incentives for creativity today offered by extra term 50 years or more in the future are negligible — while the effect on access to knowledge can be very substantial, especially when term extensions are applied retrospectively (as they almost always are).

It is also noteworthy that recent extensions, such as that for authorial copyright in the US (the CTEA) and the proposed extension of recording copyright in the EU, have been opposed well-nigh unanimously by academic economists and other IP scholars. Policy-making in this area should be evidence-based and designed to promote the broader welfare of society as a whole. Policies that appear to reflect nothing more than special-interest lobbying will only perpetuate the “marked lack of public legitimacy” which the Gowers report lamented, discouraging those who wish to contribute constructively to future Government policy-making in these areas, and making enforcement ever harder — effective enforcement, after all, depends on consent borne of respect as well as obedience coerced through punishment.

The lead article of Prospect Magazine’s February issue is a piece by by James Crabtree and Tom Chatfield entitled “Mashing the State”. It’s an in-depth look at the recent launch of data.gov.uk and its place in the wider context of government policy in relation to information — as well as information’s relation to governance (that “mashing” of the state …).

Where Does My Money Go gets a mention as does the “Cambridge” paper on pricing models at trading funds.

This Wednesday (27th of January) at 1pm I’m giving one of Cambridge University Library’s regular lunch-time talks on Openness and Libraries. Attendance is free and anyone can come along!

Update (28th Jan): talk is done and slides are now up.

Blurb

Over the past few years, open licensing (http://www.opendefinition.org/) has facilitated the explosive growth of a ‘knowledge commons’. To give a few prominent examples: Open Access journals, Open Educational Resources and Open Data in scientific research have all been enabled by licenses which permit material to be freely re-used and re-distributed. This outpouring of support for openness has led to an incredible rise in community-led development and innovative uses.

Bibliographic records are a key part of our shared cultural heritage and essential to anyone working with cultural materials (books, music, films etc). Opening up those records for access and re-use offer a variety of benefits.

First, it would allow libraries to share records more efficiently and improve quality more rapidly through better, easier feedback. Second, easier access to catalogue data would spur development of the multifarious services, technologies and research that use that data, including, for example, search engines, book or music websites, researchers working on information production, journalists writing on orphan works, as well as many other areas we cannot even imagine in advance.

With a growing number of Government agencies and public institutions making data open, is is now time for the library community to do likewise?

Attended an interesting talk today: “Historical Banking Crises and the Rules of the Game” by Professor Charles Calomiris, Columbia Business School. Sporadic notes below. See also this Weaving History thread on Financial Crises.

Notes

• One crisis with 20 different explanations. Need to sort these out a little.
• If banks are uninsured then in a recession banks cut their supply of loans
  • Banks are facing losses, need to bulk up their balance sheet and can do it either by raising equity or cutting supply of loans. Former is hard so do the latter.
• Crisis aren’t just inherent to human nature or capitalism. “Crisis propensity reflects politically determined rules of the banking game that are conducive to crises:”
  1. industry setup that determines exposure of banks to risk
  2. absence of decent (effective and incentive compatible) central-banking (NB: 2 isn’t a big problem w/o 1)
  3. subsidization of risk by govt policies
• Panic = moments of severe sudden withdrawal that threatened the system. Observable variable: collective action by NY clearing banks
  • In US (19th and early 20th c.): 1857, 1873, 1877, 1893, 1907 [ed: missing at least 2 and may have got wrong I think]
  • All of 6 crises in US post civil war were all preceded by 50% increase in liabilities and 7% drop in stock market
  • Britain: 1825, 1836, 1847, 1857, 1866 then none for over a century
• Solvency crisis: -ve net worth of failed bank > 1% of GDP
  • 140 examples since 1978
  • Rare in past: 4 in 1873-1913
  • Australia: 1893 (10%)
  • Argentina: 1890 (10%)
  • Norway: 1900 (3%)
  • Italy: 1893 (1%)
• Literature has converged in last 20 years to agree that safety-net provision on balance increases instability (rather than reducing it)
• Crucial reform in 1858 in UK following 1857 crisis. BoE would no longer intervene in bills market. In 1866 made good on this promise when largest bill discounter went bust (Overend and Gurney)
• Crisis origins:
  • Loose money: CBs, flat yield curve … (but note not enough for a crisis on own)
  • Housing subsidies delivered by leverage. F&F have $1.6 trillion out of $3 trillion total subprime. $350 billion cost on F&F alone.
  • Huge buy-side agency problems
    • Lots of buy-side people buying poor quality material for clients facility by big race-to-the-bottom at ratings agency
  • Prudential regulation failure
• Everyone smart knew there was a subprime crisis in mid-2006.
• Long-term regulatory reforms
  • Micro-prudential reform: focus on measurement of risk
  • Credit rating agency reform
  • Resolution policy/TBTF Problems

I’m one of the co-organizers of a workshop on Public Domain Calculators workshop taking place next week, on the 10th and 11th of November, at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

Hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge, it’s a meeting of European experts on copyright and the digital public domain taking place as part of the Communia project.

The purpose of the workshop is to produce materials such as legal flow charts and public domain “algorithms” which will help with the representation of different national copyright laws and the determination of public domain status.

Details of the meeting are as follows:

• When: 10-11th November 2009
• Where: Emmanuel College, Cambridge
• Wiki: http://wiki.okfn.org/PublicDomainCalculators/Meeting
• Participate: Free but space is limited. If you are interested in coming, email the organizers at: info@okfn.org

Background

There is often a tendency to talk of ‘the public domain’ and of works falling out of copyright and ‘into the public domain’ – as though there is a single set of works which are out of copyright all over the world. In fact, of course, there are different national laws about the nature and duration of copyright in different types of works – and hence what is in the public domain is different in different countries.

Efforts are currently underway to build a series of public domain calculators – which will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction. At the time of writing groups and individuals in more than 17 jurisdictions are assisting in this effort.

The other day I posted up some work-in-progress on the subject of patterns of knowledge production.

That material is still in a fairly preliminary state. However, my decision to release it it in this form was a conscious decision and part of an ongoing attempt on my part to practice a more open “release early, release often” approach to research.

In doing this I’m drawing direct inspiration from the open source and open notebook (science) communities and seeking to engage in what might be termed open notebook social science!

I think most researchers (including myself) feel a reluctance to put out material that isn’t at a reasonable level of maturity. While there are some good reasons for this, I think the main motivations are less positive, and are primarily to do with fear: be it of criticism or that your ideas are “taken” by others. While such fears can have some basis, it seems to me the benefits of an open approach — in terms of visibility, dissemination, and potential for collaboration — significantly outweigh any of the associated risks.

Over the last year, I’ve already been making some effort to move in this direction but from this point on I’m aiming to do this more thoroughly and methodically. A first step in this will be to put all the “patterns” and data online.

I’m posting up some work-in-progress entitled Exploring Patterns of Knowledge Production (link to full pdf). Below I’ve excerpted the introduction plus list of motivational questions. Comments (and critique) very welcome!

Introduction

In what follows the term ‘knowledge’ is here used broadly to signify all forms of information production including those involved in technological innovation, cultural creativity and academic advance.

Today, thanks to rapid advances in IT, we have available substantial datasets pertaining both to the extent and the structure of knowledge production across disciplines, space and time.

Especially recent is the availability of good ’structural’ data — that is data on the linkages and relationships of different pieces of knowledge, for example as provided by citation information. This new material allows us to explore the “patterns of knowledge production” in deeper and richer ways than ever previously possible and often using entirely new methods.

For example, it has long been accepted that innovation and creativity are cumulative processes, in which new ideas build upon old. However, other than anecdotal and case-study material provided by historians of ideas and sociologists of science there has been little data with which to study this issue — and almost none of a comprehensive kind that would make possible a systematic examination.

However, the recent availability of comprehensive databases containing ‘citation’ information have allowed us to begin really examining the extent to which new work builds upon old — be it a new technology as represented by a patent or a new idea in academia as represented by a paper, builds upon old.

Similar opportunities present themselves in relation to identifying the creation of new fields of research or technology, and tracing their evolution over time. Here the existence of extensive “structural information” as presented, for example, by citation databases, enables new systematic approaches — for example, can new fields be identified (or perhaps defined) as points in ‘knowledge space’ far away from the existing loci of effort? or, alternatively, by the nature of its connections to the existing body of work?

Structural information of this kind can also be used in charting other changes in the life-cycle of knowledge creation. For example, to offer a specific conjecture, a field entering decline, though still exhibiting a similar level of output (papers etc) and even citations to a field in rude health, may display a citation structure which is markedly different — for example, more clustered within the field itself. Thus, by using this additional structural information we may be able to gain insights not available with simpler approaches.

At the same time, structure must also play a central role in any attempt to estimate knowledge related ‘output’ measures. This is of course not true for other forms of ‘output’, for example that of corn of steel, where we have relatively well-defined objective measures available: tonnes of such-and-such a quality.

But knowledge is different: the most obvious metrics, such as number of patents or papers produced, seem entirely inadequate: one particular innovation or paper may be ‘worth’ as much as a hundred or a thousand others.

The issue here is that, compared to corn or steel, knowledge is extremely inhomogeneous, or put slightly differently, quality (or significance) differs very substantially across the individual pieces of knowledge (papers, patents etc).

Thus, any serious attempt to measure the progress of knowledge must must find some way to do this quality-adjustment and structural information seems essential to this.

What specific questions might we explore with such datasets?

The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of the kinds of questions one might explore using these new datasets:

• Can we use structure to infer information about quality of individual items? Clearly the answer is yes, for example by using a citation-based metric where a work’s value is estimated based on its citation by others.
• Can we then use this information together with more global structure of the production network to gain a better idea of total (quality-adjusted) output. This would allow one to chart progress, or the lack of it, over time?
• Can we use structural information to investigate the life-cycle of fields? For example, can we see fields ‘dying out’ or the onset of diminishing returns? Can we see new fields coming into existence and their initial growth patterns?
• What about productivity per capita and its variation across the population? It is likely that one would need to focus here within a discipline as it would be difficult to directly compare across disciplines, at least when using quality adjusted productivity.
• Do the structures of knowledge production vary over time and across disciplines and does this have implications for their productivity? Can we compare the structure of evolution in technology or economics with that in ‘natural’ evolution and, if not, what are the primary differences?
• How do other (observable) attributes related to the producers of knowledge (their collaboration with others, their geographical location) affect the structures we observe and the associated outcomes (output, productivity) already discussed above?
• Do different policies (for example openness vs. closedness — weak vs. strong IP) have implications for the structure of production and hence for output and productivity?
• Is knowledge production (in a particular area) ergodic or path-dependent? Crudely: do we always end up in the same place or do small shocks have large long-term effects?

Last week I was at the ATRIP Conference to give an invited talk on “How Long Should Copyright Last?”, based on my paper: Forever Minus a Day? Calculating the Optimal Term of Copyright.

Slide are here, and you can find the text of the accompanying introduction below (I plan to write up the full exposition as a short essay — but that is to come).

Most ATRIP participants were lawyers not economists, so this was an opportunity to do a more non-technical presentation (so no equations!). As with most economics, the fundamentals of calculating copyright term are simple: it is just a demand curve plus “welfare analysis” (a fancy name for adding up social benefits and costs), and shorn of “obfuscating” algebra these matters should be understandable by anyone.

How Long Should Copyright Last: Introduction

Before I begin it is important to note that in considering copyright and its term, we must leave to one side the questions of attribution and integrity — their existence and term can and should be considered quite separately from the ‘economic’ rights that form the core of copyright as it operates today.

This small caveat done, I beg your indulgence for a brief historical excursion. In particular, I ask you to cast your mind back a century and a half and more to the Houses of Parliament in the February of 1841.

[[Picture of Serjeant Talfourd]]

As many of you will be aware Serjeant Talfourd had, by this point, been doggedly pursuing a new copyright act for four years — since 1837. Originally wide in scope the Bill had been narrowed and the attention of both supporters and critics alike had come to focus on a single feature of that Act: the proposed extension in the term of protection. Specifically Talfourd’s Act proposed changing the then rule of 28 years or life (whichever being the longer) to life plus sixty — remarkably close to the life plus 70 of today.

[[Picture of Macaulay]]

By February 1841 Talfourd’s Bill had failed no less than 4 times. On its fifth attempt it had reached a second reading and on the fifth of February it came before the House. After a brief introduction by Talfourd — mindful that this was not the first time the matter had been discussed — Thomas Babbington Macaulay rose to speak. In a masterly disquisition, both in content and rhetoric, Macauley set out his opposition to the Bill, and did so so tellingly that the motion was defeated. Talfourd, who lost his seat at the next election, and therefore only saw his Bill pass in the hands of another — and in much reduced form — remained forever embittered by Macaulay’s intervention — coming so late and so decisively in the process.

To read Macaulay’s speech, and, for that matter, the views expressed on all sides in that debate, is to be struck by how little has changed.

[[Valenti Picture]]

When Jack Valenti and Mary Bono are found in recent times calling for a term of ‘Forever Minus a Day’ one hears the echoes of Serjeant Talfourd all those years ago, just as one can hear echoes of those who oppose extensions today of the likes of Henry Warburton, a radical politician and vehement opponent of Talfourd, who claimed the extension was “a robbery upon the public” and that copyright ought to be fixed, “only on such a term of years as would prove a sufficient inducement for authors to write good books”.

And the analogy is telling in other ways. Though Talfourd’s Bill was beaten back by a swell of opposition year after year eventually it was passed — albeit in reduced form and by Lord Mahon — with this success attributable to a persistence made possible not, primarily, by the size, but by the concentration of the interests who sought its passage. Like Fabius Cunctator the proponents of extension, sustained by deep reservoirs of emotional and financial commitment, can afford to wait, able to return, as necessary, again and again, until an opportune moment presents itself for the attainment of their purposes — for the opposition to extension, though broad is ’shallow’ and therefore more easily dissipated by distraction and division.

[[Philosophical Differences]]

Even more striking are the similarity in the issues that occupy centre stage in this debate. First, the fundamental ‘philosophical’ question — which colours all of discussion — of whether we confer copyright because it is a natural right — which should therefore last forever — or for ‘utilitarian’ purposes, that is the public good — in which case it almost certainly should not. Second, descending from these lofty heights of principle, what is the actual effect is copyright? In particular, does it operate to raise price and restrict access — that is: is it a monopoly?; and what specifically are the benefits that accrue to the producers of copyrightable works, and what costs to the public and others who wish to use and reuse them.

I think it is clear that economists — or any group for that matter — have no great claim to authority on answering this first question of principle, for it seems, ultimately, one of opinion. That said, I would note two points which must raise grave doubts as to the existence of any fundamental natural right from which copyright might spring.

First, term limited in all jurisdictions. Second, the breadth of copyright’s application both in subject matter, quality and ownership. For can we truly convince ourselves that “eternal expressions of the human spirit”, worthy of exclusivity for all time, subsist in an advert for toothpaste; or convince ourselves of the special status of the creator when so much copyright today, perhaps even the majority, is immediately, and indeed often automatically, assigned from the ‘creator’ to a corporation.

However, it is not my intention to enter into this debate any further here. Rather, in the interests of ‘full disclosure’ I wish only to make clear my views — and those of economists generally — on the matter, namely that copyright is not a natural right but is created and maintained for the purpose of promoting and securing the public good, no more, no less. (These are views which can come as no surprise given the nature of this talk — an analysis of term only makes sense if its basis is a utilitarian one!)

[[My Views]]

Furthermore, let me also make clear, right at the outset, my view, and one again I think shared by almost all economists, that copyright is a monopoly. This is not to say that copyright is bad — far from it. But to deny that copyright is a monopoly is to obscure its basic nature and operation — an obscuration that has, furthermore and unfortunately, been most common and attractive to those pursuing copyright’s enlargement.

[[The Big M Word]]

And what is the general tendency of monopoly — to echo Macaulay once again? It is indeed to raise prices and limit access. Now, of course, we may debate the precise extent of these effects, but there can be no denying that the very purpose of copyright’s existence is to confer on a single entity — the copyright holder — the power to control the dissemination, and hence the price, of all instances of a particular good — i.e. all copies of a given work.

This is the very definition of a monopoly and the fact that there may exist other goods, other works, which compete with that one makes no difference — a monopoly of apples is no less a monopoly because one does not control oranges. Of course, the existence and proximity of substitutes will alter the affect of the monopoly, but one must be cautious here: close substitutes may limit the negative effects of the copyright monopoly but they will, for the very same reasons, also limit the gains (those increased revenues for copyright-holder).

Returning then to Macaulay whose expression of the matter I cannot better:

[[Macaulay Again]]

“It is good that authors be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil, but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for securing the good.”

Our task then is to answer the implicit question: how long should copyright last (so as to not be a day longer than is needed)? More specifically what are the degrees of benefit and harm created by copyright’s monopoly and at what level should term be set to achieve the most advantageous balance of the two?

Current methods of disseminating scholarly information focus on the use of journals who retain exclusive rights in the material they publish. Recently there has been increasing dissatisfaction with this model, with suggestions for alternative approaches such as “Open Access”.

Together with a colleague (Omar Al-Ubaydli) I’ve been working to explore the reasons for the development of the traditional journal model, why it is no longer efficient and how it could be improved upon. We’re particularly interested in going beyond the basic question of distribution (access) to that of filtering, i.e. the process of matching information with the scholars who want it.

With the volume of information production ever growing — and attention ever more scarce — filtering is becoming crucial. Digital technology offers us some radically new possibilities. In particular, distribution and filtering can be separated, in turn, allowing filtering to be decentralized and distributed — a model which promises dramatic increases in transparency, innovation and efficiency.

Below is an overview of our analysis with the full version of the current paper here: http://rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/scholars_and_journals.pdf

Overview

It is crucial to the progress of any domain of scholarship that those engaged therein are able to communicate their discoveries and activities to others. As such a variety of systems and institutions have been developed in order to support ’scholarly communication’ in one form or another ranging from personal letters to physical meetings. In recent times, the growth of scholarship, combined with its increasing geographical dispersion, have resulted in the centrality of the written word and its dissemination via ‘journals’. In this paper we consider the purposes of any system of scholarly communication and consider the current academic journal system in light of them. This examination highlights several deficiencies and also suggest various possible improvements.

When thinking about the possible mechanisms of scholarly communication it is useful to specify in more detail the criteria against which they should be measured. That is, to put it more succinctly, what do we want a good mechanism for scholarly communication to do? In particular, when we say communicate we must ask ourselves what, to whom, in what form, etc etc. For it is clear that when we talk of communication we usually mean more than the simple transmission of a piece of information. In fact, today, with so much scholarship available, the challenge may often not lie in the transmission from the author to the reader but in the matching of authors and readers — the decision of ‘what to read’. This growing focus on choice is a natural one in a world where time and attention are limited and the amount of scholarship available is ever increasing. As such it suggests that there are at least two distinct functions performed by a system of scholarly communication:

• Distribution — getting information from authors to readers (and back again)
• Selection (filtering) — deciding what to distribute and to whom

In appreciating this distinction it is illuminating to consider how practice has changed over time. Originally communication between scholars, at least in written form, primarily took the form of letters between the individuals involved. As such, the two activities of distribution and filtering would be almost completely identical. Then, as the number of authors and readers grew this became infeasible and dedicated journals would be created which would then disseminate to their particular readers a selection of what was submitted to them. Thus, what was once a direct peer-to-peer relationship became mediated by a new institutional form: the academic journal — though of course journals were often run by the very readers and authors who used them. Finally, today, thanks to digitization and the Internet peer-to-peer is once again a possibility though with important differences: unlike in the past, where a letter writer chooses the recipient, the modern peer-to-peer approach more resembles journals in that the author and reader act independently — the author uploads or publishes his/her work to a repository entirely separately from the reader finding, downloading and reading it. This last discussion suggests breaking down our original two categories a little further:

• ‘Making available’ — publishing material
• Discovery — finding out what is available
• Choice — choosing from what is available
• Reading — getting access to the material (in the form required)

Here, the first and fourth item would come under the ‘distribution’ heading while the second and third would come under ’selection’. In addition we should mention two other functions performed by such a system, both of which relate to selection: a) improvement of work via peer-review (distinct from filtering process itself); b) ‘quality signalling’ whereby the selection of work helps signal the quality of its creators which in turn is important for the purpose of resource allocation (jobs, grants etc) within the scholarly community.

With these added to the list we now have a good number of separate goals which a scholarly communication mechanism may seek to satisfy. The next stage is to consider how the current system, largely based on academic journals, fares in respect of them.

Goals, Instruments and the Current Journal System

It is well known that in order to fully address a given number of (independent) goals one needs an equal number of instruments. For example, if one is seeking to address both congestion and pollution in relation to road-traffic, a single instrument such as petrol taxes, will be insufficient.

Here too there are multiple independent goals, most notably distribution and selection (matching). These are clearly distinct goals and require distinct instruments for their achievement but journals are but a single instrument which combine distribution and filtering in one mechanism.

Originally, the restrictions of reproduction and distribution technologies, meant they were the best instrument available. Today, with the advent of the computer and the Internet, this is no longer true: distribution (the uploading and downloading) can be done by almost anyone and quite separately from recommendations and rating of that material.

As such, the traditional journal system is becoming a serious constraint, particularly in its closed access form. There are two distinct aspects of this constraint. First, on the distribution side, journals delay and restrict access as a result of higher prices arising either from simple monopoly control or the costs of the (inefficient) selection mechanism the traditional model necessitates. Second, on the selection side, the forced combination of selection and distribution and the associated monopoly control of content greatly limit the efficiency (and utility) of the selection and filtering processes used to match authors and readers together.

Unfortunately, the two-sided nature of the journal market (based on expectations), combined with the current evaluation structure of academia, continue to lock society into this inefficient restriction. Open-access journals provides are an important part of improving the current situation. However, as we discuss below, they are only a first step: in order to reap the full benefits of new technology we must move away from the traditional ‘journal’ model to a system that allow for full separation between the distribution and selection operations.

The Technological Origins of Modern Inefficiency

At this point it is worth considering in a little more detail why restricted-access journals originally came about. The answer lies in the nature of the technology available in earlier periods to manage distribution (printing and transmission). When many journals were originally started the cost of transmitting information was very high and journals acted as a club good by which the costs of reproduction and distribution could be (efficiently) shared (the efficiency arising here from economies of scale).

At the same time, given the limited ‘bandwidth’ it was natural for journals to take on some filtering role in order to economize on the scarce distribution capacity. In this situation, dissemination is limited and with only one instrument available (journals), it is natural to tie dissemination and filtering together (with filtering in many ways secondary). Once filtering is being done it is natural for journals to ‘tie’ material to the journal explicitly via copyright — though at an early stage given the scale economies of journals this explicit tying was not actually necessary and was probably done for simple legal convenience.

With the advent of digital communications, in particular the Internet, bandwidth is no longer scarce. What is now scarce is attention. In this setup the importance of a journal is not its role in efficiently sharing reproduction and distribution costs but its role as a filtering mechanism. However, there is now a problem: when distribution is central it is natural to ‘add-in’ filtering, it is not natural, or necessary, to tie distribution to filtering when filtering is central. In fact it seems clear that distribution and filtering can be done entirely separately (there are potentially lots of ways for you to download my paper quite separate from getting it from a journal — and lots of ways to do matching and filtering other than by journal editors and reviewers). The Open Access movement can be seen as largely about achieving this separation: with open access there is no longer a connection between access/distribution (which would be free) and the filtering mechanism (the choice of which articles go in a particular journal).

That said the ‘Open Access’ movement still has a large focus on journals — albeit open-access ones. This, in our view, is a mistake. Technology has also affected possibilities for filtering. In particular it is no longer clear why the centralized mechanism of official peer-review and journals is superior to alternative decentralized options. The last decade, has witnessed widespread, and often successful, experimentation with distributed voting and evaluation mechanisms (for example Slashdot’s story-ratings and Google’s link-based site rankings).

Thus, to be more radical, it makes sense not only to remove centralized control of distribution but also centralized control of filtering. A more distributed (market-like?) filtering mechanism would permit the same freedom (and same status) for reviewing and recommendation as it does in the production of scholarly information. At the same time it would deliver greater transparency and, by permitting ‘free-entry’ in filtering, would permit greater specialization, greater diversity, increased participation and the increasing efficiency flowing from greater competition.

As such, the gains from going ‘open’ are not simply wider access, but a reduction in the time and energy scholars spend finding and processing research information. Significantly, this second item, which is less frequently mentioned in discussions of ‘Open Access‘, may well be the most significant.