The thesis here seems to be free math makes life better for most mathematicians. One set of references that would be interesting to consult/critique is Ewing’s work on “open access publishing” etc.; another is the book “Policy Analysis” by Weimer and Vining that my dad recommended (here we should get some info about the economics of public goods etc.). bloftin mentioned “Freakonomics”; the example he cited seems to be mainly useful in a negative sense, i.e., we would want to show that control of information in math is not the same as control of information in real estate. –jcorneli
Note that the energetic & in some cases vitriolic conversation about Public Domain and licensing after the board meeting can only underscore my point that this is an important issue at this time. –jcorneli
Some of that discussion wound up on the PM Licenses page. (Which is still in progress.) I think we should letter to Ewing|reach out to John Ewing about some of the questions here. –jcorneli
I think we can also emphasize the “developing scholars” angle here again. Note that non-free math mostly benefits an insular community of scholars (“the academic priesthood”), and keeps the knowledge locked in. It is monopolized. Members of such cabals want to profit off this “secret knowledge” in various ways (I won’t go into them; you doubtless know them).
Ways of maintaining this lock-in of knowledge (either intentional or not) have been expensive journal subscriptions, high conference rates, expensive textbooks, the need for particular credentials to join professional associations or attend conferences, and of course, restrictive licensing.
There are two levels of going beyond this: open access, and then open creation.
When you attain the first level, you have allowed information to “flow out” to two constituencies that go beyond the “priesthood”: (1) students who are pursuing study in that area (either formally or informally), and (2) the general public. When students can get to the knowledge, they can use it to augment their study (if formal), or more successfully learn a topic if informal (typically without open access they will entirely fail to gain high levels of understanding; hence an apathic general public and crackpots).
Beyond this, the constituency of the general public that is not pursuing study in the field may chance upon some of its knowledge if it is open access, and then become interested. At this point they become a de facto member of the first group, the students, and choose to learn more, which they can now do. Or they may take small bits of the knowledge and use it to augment their life in general or their main area(s) of expertise.
This is all very good, but it is only the beginning. Open access mostly benefits the public; that is, everyone outside of the core productive scholarly community. Open creation takes the benefit to the next level, actually benefitting that core community itself.
In the case where the outsiders have chosen to pursue study or continue with it because of open access to the knowledge, they will also have the option of becoming a full member of the scholarly community by actually participating in the expression and/or development of the knowledge.
This connects back to the main point about producing scholars, which is a good altruistic thing to do. But beyond this, the scholarly community itself benefits in a number of ways. Trivially speaking, open production increases the size of this community both in members and content. But even more importantly, open production enriches the community by exposing it to new perspectives and ideas.
In the past system of closed knowledge production, this could happen only when sufficient momentum was gained for a new knowledge community to break out of an old one. However, without anything but the same closed “architecture” to implement as the backbone for the new community, it was always doomed to eventually attain the same unfortunate fate: stasis of ideas, lack of creativity and innovation, and increasing irrelevance.
20th century science and mathematics is rife with examples of thinkers who were beyond their time but were easily rejected by closed knowledge systems, only to have their ideas finally picked up and recognized to be superior 25, 50, or even 75 years later. Perhaps with open versions of the same scholarly communities available, it would have been more difficult for these people’s ideas to be ignored. Now is the time we can act to save society in general from the negative consequences of this effect in this century.
–akrowne Sat Feb 11 06:05:39 UTC 2006
Guys: I think that our current Detailed_PM_whitepaper_outline|outline gets pretty meager in the free math section. I feel I won’t really know how useful our discussions have been (including our general Discussions and the Understanding free math|other ad hoc free math discussion page) until I see a recognizably good outline of the major points. Since I know that some of the key experts on the issue of free math frequently use this wiki, I’d appreciate it if they can all check in on that section of the outline.