DoctorMo's Blog

As Document Freedom Day (DFD) is only a month away (March 25th), I thought it’d be an idea to reflect on the implications of free access to information and the ability to have that information in a standard open format.

In the traditional science world it seems they’re going through a bit of a revolution themselves. Long has it been that researchers would publish their documents through a respectable journal such as Nature. These journals can then only be read by other researchers at other institutes that pay a great deal of money to the publishers. The noteriety of the publication gets the author the credit and standing required to get jobs and advanced posts in her field.

But the internet has made this massive money making scheme look a little ridiculous. Any researcher could post information to the Internet, where it can be freely shared with (god forbid) freelance scientist and hobbyists who are not a part of the academic world any more, more importantly, people who are not in a position to pay huge sums of money for subscriptions.

I a previous blog posts about Free Software, I say how I’m very much in agreement with Cory Doctorow about the nature of Free Software and it’s parallels with scientific progress. Then how could it be that the traditional publications of scientific knowledge are themselves fighting against this most important scientific principle?

Also of great importance is the format in which this information is distributed. When I do some art work or some little icons, I always release the svg sources and export to raster pngs web or pdfs for printing. All of these formats are well documented standards which I trust with my creative content.

I would consider it poisonous for the use of any proprietary format to become common place, such a problem is the secrete formatting of a third parties data, that I would make it illegal for a software to do so, if I were in power. The rights of the creator, author and copyright holder are clearly more important than the trade secretes of the company involved.

The complexity and ignorance around technology means we can not use Caveat Emptor (Buyer Beware) as a serious defence against implementing strong customer protections in this area.