A comment to my post Negotiating Open Access – a mutual success resonates with me:
# Rupak Chakravarty Says:
November 17th, 2006 at 6:03 am e
I believe, If we really want to knowledge driven open society, where business models are less effective in governing the process of knowledge creation and sharing, we will have to follow the “Barter System”.
As in Barter system, in which goods or services are exchanged for other goods and/or services; no money is involved in the transaction, the knowledge society should be based on “bartering knowledge”.
I’m a great listener/ reader of Sir(s). Peter Suber and Steven Harnad and look forward to receive the pieces of “digital intellect” posted by them on the web.
Thanks and regards.
Long Live THE Open Access.
Thanks Rupak,
I have been toying with this idea for some time – if we run a useful service we don’t want to charge for access – all the hassle of licenses, micropayments, anticommons, etc. We might use a donation system (of money) and maybe we shall. But I have been attracted by payment in kind…
Shortly we plan to release a major knowledge base (details later, but it involves molecular structure, crystallography, etc.) which is all Open (CC) and we hope people will use. However we need more content – especially that locked up in the dungeons of dusty departments – which is effectively Open but not disseminated. Scientists will have this content anyway (if they can still find it!) and all they will need to do is donate their already Open (but not disseminated) work – our service will act as an aggregator and disseminator.
In one sense this is common in some communities – you cannot publish genes, strucures, crystallography without donating your data to the community. But it is a controlled process (through a mixtures of learned socs and publishers) – we are proposing here a “gift economy”
I will return to this theme later but would welcome instances where this already works.