Ending Knowledge Cartels.

“Last month I had the privilege of speaking to the annual Computers in Writing Conference. The organizers were interested in hearing my perspective on open scholarship and the university... But to briefly summarize I made the claim that increasingly academic interests are running counter to that of the publishing industry. And that while I find recent calls to move towards open scholarship such as the Harvard Letter important, I think that economic justification is not the primary reason we ought to pursue open scholarship. In short I think this is a moral issue. Knowledge Cartels are increasingly controlling, and restricting knowledge production and dissemination. This is happening broadly across our culture but the universities complicity in this, from drug patents to for profit publishing is troubling. I am not going to rehash the long argument here, if you want you can watch the video. ... I want to highlight the how-to portion of my talk, the ten steps to breaking up the knowledge cartels. We give away our knowledge for free the only question is do we want to give it away to the public or to the cartels. Overcoming the knowledge cartels in the academy is simply a collective action problem ... I offer 10 steps to take to achieve this goal...”