With the onset of digital publication, however, academia has entered an abundance economy. In the past, even integrating black and white images or graphics into a text substantially increased the cost of publication, and widespread distribution of scholarly texts was prohibitively expensive. Modern digital technology has made it possible to easily and inexpensively incorporate not only pictures but music, video clips, surveys, and other forms of interactive media into scholarly and non-scholarly works. In addition, [long tail] dynamics have made it possible for even hyper-specialized works of scholarship to reach broad audiences in a number of different disciplines and on a much more global scale. Works that previously justified no more than five hundred print copies are being downloaded and utilized thousands and thousands of times thanks to online repositories and recent digitization efforts. These efforts are making knowledge more accessible for millions of users throughout the world, thus demonstrating to a broad audience the value of the humanities within a modern context.
However, despite the apparent ease and affordability of reproduction and distribution of scholarly works, scholars and publishers within the humanities still operate under a scarcity mentality, and a number of barriers yet stand in the way of open content distribution. Much of the world's digital knowledge is cloistered away in subscription-based academic archives, and while copyright remains an important part of digital culture, it has, in some sense, crippled the humanities and detracted from the influence and relevance of the discipline within a modern setting. In his article, "Manufacturing Scarcity," Tim Laquinto suggests that the idea of copyright has become conflated with “idea protection” and has thus stifled the creative influence that its creators first sought to promote. Copyright law and subscription-based archives, Laquinto notes, are based on a paradigm of information scarcity, whereas modern technological advancements have launched us into a world of information abundance. Digital archiving has made it possible for content providers to host enormous volumes of material with minimal expenditures, and that means that people should, theoretically, be able to access a much larger library of information, but the reality is, that's not always the case. Alan Lui presents a great illustration of this point in his article contained in the SAGE online journal archive. Go ahead and click this link to go the article. Well, for those of you who actually obliged, unless you were logged into a University database or were willing to spend twenty five dollars for twenty four hours worth of access, you probably weren't able to access that article, despite its inestimable worth as a resource for digital scholarship. Really, that's one of the biggest problem with modern modes of digital writing as a whole, that despite recent efforts to digitize works of literature and scholarship, a vast majority of the world's emerging scholarly discourse remain locked behind costly subscription-based archives.
Many organizations have realized the strengths of online content distribution and have made significant efforts toward digitization of their respective resources, but exorbitant fees still make these resources largely unavailable to the general public. Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, the oldest English-language general encyclopedia, announced last year that it would be discontinuing its print edition in favor of "bigger, more numerous, and more vibrant digital forms." Many academic journals have followed suit, digitizing past issues and providing increased access through online archives. The problem is that even these resources are not truly accessible to the general public. Prohibitive access fees discourage all but the most devoted of researchers and enthusiasts from studying traditional scholarly works outside of a university setting. This serves as a significant barrier both to the advancement of public knowledge and to the growth of interest in scholarly topics, essentially precluding the possibility of collaboration or derivative works. Copyright laws were originally put in place to stimulate creativity, and instead, they have stilted it. While ownership remains an important part of the American and global mindset, the way that we think about ownership needs to be revised if the academic humanities are to subsist in the information age. As Stewart Brand asserts, "[i]nformation wants to be free," (emphasis mine) and though efforts to expand the Public Domain and the use of [Creative Commons] licenses have been successful in many regards, embracing open, digital content distribution as a new paradigm for academic writing would help to convey the significance of the humanities by making knowledge accessible and thus useful to a broader audience base.
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