David

Today has been a day for predictions. Competing predictions, in fact. I have read that Google will be gone in five years (thanks to Slashdot for the reference) and that the New York Times will go offline in 10 years because of Google. (thanks to Scott Adams for the reference) While all of this is speculation and fancy, it is not entirely unrelated to what is actualy happening in the world today. It has been an interesting romp through the web today.

Matt has really gotten me thinking on this issue. He writes about intellectual property and suggests that the term obscures everything it is attached to and that it encourages us to think about information as a thing which is owned. Somehow we have to recognize the fact that very little information is actually worth “owning.” Generally information is valuable only for sharing because when it is shared it tends to grow. Where that is the case there is no reason to retain more rights than mere attribution. There are a few things that are worth patenting, but don’t use the patent list as a way of chosing what should be patented since it includes things like this. Try reading the comments here to learn more about some of the misuse of patent law. I also think that there is a place for copyrights and trademarks, but just because there is a trademark should not mean that I cannot use the words Microsoft and Windows, even together (Microsoft Windows) without fear of being penalized. I guess what this all adds up to is the inevitable, and worn-out conclusion that these areas of law are basicaly broken. Perhaps it is because of the introduction of such a vague term as “intellecutal property.”

I like what I am hearing from Nate about what a Next Generation Journal should look like. Nate is right that “because we can” is not a good reason to make changes. We have good reason to streamline the peer-review process. We also have good reason to streamline the publication by eliminating the bundling in favor of publishing articles as they are cleared for publication and there is something to be said for publishing post-publication comments. I see no reason to publish pre-publication comments because if the comments are still relevant after publication they may be added to the post-publication comment list. The only other change that I think would be important would be in changing the model for the distribution of rights to the intellectual property. This would most likely be based on the work of Creative Commons with the author(s) retaining rights to the material while granting specific publication rights to the journal which would have to be defined, but which would probably not be hard to nail down.