On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[email protected]>
wrote:
> On 1/20/13 10:43 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>
> What would Good Academia look like?
>
> Overall, I'd say "Good academics" are just members of the set of people
> that develop skills to satisfy their curiosity.
>
> Now the problem is not the difficulty of getting word out, it's the active
> obstacles to free access to information (e.g. the JSTOR lawsuits against
> Aaron Swartz), or the enduring pay walled scientific journals. The
> professional incentives that result in non-disclosure agreements is the
> problem.<snip>
>
For those interested in more on Aaron Swartz:
http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N62/swartz.html
..from this we might assume a good academic is a dead one. Aaron is being
painted as a nut case after his suicide. He wasn't. The article is worth
reading.
There is a lot of support for freeing academic papers. A whole bunch of
Mathematicians have joined together against Elsevier:
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/
.. and indeed are doing "open source mathematics:
http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/
They'd agree, I think, with the quest for an answer to "what is Good
academics".
-- Owen
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