One credit hour at the Columbus State Community College costs $73 in addition to other fees. For a person who already knows the value of EBSCO, will be using it frequently, and is looking for an individual solution to the collective problem of access, signing up for one credit hour may be worth it until a better solution becomes available. But I said what I said because Dennis Redmond suggested that the value of professional scholarship is unknown to or underestimated by many. How should scholars introduce their work to the public? They ought to argue for free public access to their scholarship, on the grounds that the public has already paid for the production of their work.
Jim Westrich westrich at nodimension.com, Mon May 16 08:00:35 PDT 2005:
>You are promoting wider access to scholarly publications (something
>I agree with) but your example is WiFi in downtown Dayton.
Free public access to scholarly publications and free public broadband (of which free public WiFi is but one means) are two different issues. I happen to be in favor of both.
Jim wrote:
>There are progressive arguments against public WiFi as well. Its
>socialism for the high tech commuter/consumer.
By that logic, one can also argue that public four-year universities are socialism for capitalists, petty producers, and workers whose incomes fall into the top 25-30% income bracket -- they are the ones who most often come out with degrees. As things stand now, many public goods are like that, accessed very disproportionately by higher income residents. Take outdoor recreation at parks, for instance: Jin-Hyung Lee, David Scott, and Myron F. Floyd, "Structural Inequalities in Outdoor Recreation Participation: A Multiple Hierarchy Stratification Perspective," Journal of Leisure Research, 33.4, <http://www.rpts.tamu.edu/faculty/PUBS/Structural%20inequalities_2001.pdf>, (2001), 427-449. That's not an argument against parks, public post-secondary education, and so on, however. That's an argument for investing in them as well as residents' capacity to use them much more than now to broaden access to them.
Even though most -- perhaps all -- public goods today are not as egalitarian as they ought to be, segments of the ruling class are always looking to privatize existing public goods (e.g., public education, Medicare, etc.) or prevent governments from offering new ones (e.g., public broadband, universal health care, etc.) at the expense of other segments of capitalists and petty producers as well as the working class.
Communications giants, for instance, are doing all they can to block public broadband access efforts:
<blockquote>You'll be pleased to know that communism was defeated in Pennsylvania last year. Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the Reds in local government from offering free Wi-Fi throughout their municipalities. The action came after Philadelphia, where more than 50 percent of neighborhoods don't have access to broadband, embarked on a $10 million wireless Internet project. City leaders had stepped in where the free market had failed. Of course, it's a slippery slope from free Internet access to Karl Marx. So Rendell, the telecom industry's latest toady, even while exempting the City of Brotherly Love, acted to spare Pennsylvania from this grave threat to its economic freedom.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . Pushed by lobbyists, at least 14 states have passed legislation similar to Pennsylvania's. I've always wondered what almost $1 billion spent on lobbying state lawmakers gets you. Now I'm beginning to see. (Lawrence Lessig, "Why Your Broadband Sucks," Wired 13.3, <http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/view.html?pg=5>. March 2005)</blockquote>
Legislation that prohibits public broadband access provision is pending in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas (the last time I looked at the issue <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/04/efficiency-of-universal-access.html>). -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>