Unintended Consequences

"We tend to think of “undesired” results as negative ones, but Merton’s paper makes the key distinction that not all undesired results are undesirable. I think that’s the fundamental key to understanding innovation, actually. A lot of the arguments against OA focus on the undesired but foreseeable outcomes: business models will have to change, filtering and quality control methods will have to change, some people in power will have less, some new people will have new power....Some of the more nuanced arguments focus on foreseeable and truly negative outcomes: the concentration of wealth among the large publishers who can afford the move to author-pays, the lack of funds to make author-pays work in many disciplines, the inequality of asking authors to pay in the developing world, and so forth. I am more sympathetic to these arguments by far, and we have to address them....But there are going to be “undesired” effects of this purposive action - as in, effects that weren’t part of our argument for the change, or part of the arguments against it. Donald Rumsfeld famously called these “unknown unknowns”. Some of the unknown unknowns are going to be positive. Some are going to be negative. The beauty of systems that are open at the core is that those who follow us will have the rights to amplify the good ones, and the rights to fix the bad ones. And that’s in the end the point of Open Access, for me, as a purposive social action...."