Peter Suber

What would John Dewey think of social media? We don't know, of course. He was born in 1859 and died in 1952. But I suggest that he was one of the first to think about the questions we now ask about social media. Here are some passages from The Public and Its Problems, which he published in 1927, nearly a century ago. I'm quoting from the open access Standard EBooks edition. I'm only quoting passages here, not writing an essay.

Journal publishers don’t need exclusive rights. More precisely, they don’t need them for publishing. They don’t need exclusive rights to make a work public or to add value in the form of peer review, copyediting, metadata, formatting, discoverability, preservation, and so on. Nor do they need exclusive rights to make enough money to pay their bills and grow. They only need exclusive rights for monopoly control over the published work and the revenue it might yield.

Description Praise Resources Open Access A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn't) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and beneficial. The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.