2019-12-17
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Comment on "The Oligopoly of Academic
Publishers in the Digital Era"
The original document quoted here:
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/undo/q001
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I found the linked document while following a story about people
leaking scientific publication to a service called Sci-Hub.
Basically, there are people who criticize academic publishers
for holding science back and discriminating against poorer
institutions and nations.
It seems to me common theme. It's a bit hard to get my mind
around it. I think the easiest way to think about this is
through the terms:
1) Enabler
2) Gatekeeper
Obviously the publishers started as enablers. There were times
when publishing was a technical challenge in the same way as
building a web site might be a technical challenge these days.
But would you expect a web designer to be the arbiter of what
is considered scientific research, what isn't and who can see it?
So, the publishers lost their usefulness as an enabler and
they became a gatekeeper instead. I think this is a huge
tragedy for human knowledge and progress. But what is more, it
is not a rare case. You could come up with similar schemes all
day long.
How about the educational institutions themselves? There are
a lot of professions that could be studied quite conveniently
online, but the biggest opposition to this seems to be that
"it cannot be verified" later on because the lack of
standardized diplomas. This is insane! The core of education
should be that a person learns something important, not that
they get a paper that validates them as a different social
class than the one they were when they begin their studies.
I am not sure how this fits the enabler-gatekeeper model:
Search engine optimization. I think this is a weird case.
So, it is again obvious that search engines used to be
enablers. It seems to me that a case could be made that
they are now more gatekeepers because to get to the top of
the search you will have to "pay" with the content formatting
and this "payment" cannot be increased past a certain point.
So let us imagine two people:
Nicodemus and Bill
NICODEMUS is a reneissance man, a brilliant researcher and
a writer.
BILL has a bunch of opinions and writes a blog.
Both of these people can optimize the hell out of their web
sites, but their way of communicating makes them come up
differently in search engines:
1) Bill writes short posts. A page or two. This means
his material appears more times than Nicodemus' since
Nicodemus writes long and deep articles.
2) Bill uses simple words. This means that most people
will be able to find Bill's articles, while Nicodemus
loses with fancy vocabulary that no one knows.
3) Bill has opinions about things that are current. This
means that at any time there are more people interested
in what Bill is writing about than Nicodemus' grand
themes.
4) Even though both optimize the site in terms of using
keywords and so on, Nicodemus will not compromize the
content by repeating certain terms in the text. Bill
does exactly this and the SEO likes him.
I could probably go on about this, but what this means is
that SEO as a common practice becomes a sort of a filter
that keeps quality content down. Basically there is a bell
curve that makes it a easier for certain type of content
to be found than others, so that content is being written
more than any other type and as time goes on, it will be
impossible to find anything else anymore. We are building
the haystack around the needle!
You can try this yourself: Try searching about SEO.
It is almost impossible to find anything except a bunch of
desperate marketers explaining you the ten things you
never knew about SEO or some other "for dummies" blogs.
And the sad thing is, this will happen to everything
sooner or later. Have you realized how the amount of
OMG-faces are increasing on youtube? You may have the
most expressionless person talking on a video but they
will not fail to muster a surprised looking face to
put on the thumbnail image.
It is sickening. I am sure they will ruin podcasts too.
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