A bit of a follow-up to last week’s posting on Twitter, which seemed to come out as part of a society-wide post-Oprah/Ashton Twitter backlash.

When assessing something like Twitter, I think it’s important to remember that it’s just a tool, and as David Pogue has written, it is whatever you make of it. My objection is not so much with the tool itself, but to the way it’s being used, or at least the way so many are advising that I use it. I do understand that there is a power in Twitter, in both its immediacy and its accessibility. And that it can be a very valuable tool when used in a correct context. Cameron Neylon gives a great example of a specific situation where Twitter was very handy. He describes an ad hoc group put together to discuss a webcast meeting that led to the organization of a new meeting on the subject. Twitter worked well because people could contact one another in real-time, and more importantly, a widespread group was able to find one another to connect. It’s interesting to note that Neylon and his group needed to move beyond Twitter to other tools better suited for their efforts. While the 140 character limit is often pitched as a “feature” of Twitter, in reality, it’s a drawback to serious conversation and the communication of information. It either leads to shallow discussions or to kludgy workarounds like sending shortened URLs of webpages where you’ve written out what you actually want to say.

The issue isn’t with using something like Twitter in that sort of situation, where it’s appropriate and useful. The issue is with the idea that we’re all supposed to subscribe to one another’s tweets and spend chunks of our day reading through the gibberish that makes up so much of Twitter’s traffic. The telephone is also a useful tool, but no one is suggesting you leave the speakerphone on in your office all day to listen to the idle conversations of strangers. The stereotype so often used to deride Twitter is someone sending out messages about what they are having for breakfast. Jason Kottke attempts to defend the banality in so much of Twitter by noting that people are inherently banal, so trivial and meaningless conversations are to be expected. The problem I have with this is understanding why I would deliberately subject myself to even more banality than I face in my real life. Yes, we all generate and tolerate a good deal of smalltalk in our lives. But do we want to commit extra time to collecting more of it? Is it somehow more meaningful if it comes from a famous or respected person? Am I supposed to get off on the frisson of knowing what Ashton Kutcher is watching on tv?

Like most working professionals, I am limited in my time and attention, and need to spend both judiciously. While serendipity can lead to interesting new directions, it’s a highly inefficient process and directed methods are always going to be preferred where possible. So Twitter strikes me as a tool that can prove useful in a directed manner in specific situations. It’s the idea of using it for sorting haystacks for needles that strikes me as uninteresting.

Haven’t done one of these for a while, so here’s a few recent bookmarks of interest:

Kindle Failings Serve as Early Warning
I’ve got a new gig, well, sort of. I’ve been invited to join the crew at the Scholarly Kitchen, so I’ll be posting there occasionally when I have something relevant to say. My first post was a summary of who I am and what I’ve written about over here. This is my first original post over there, on worries about DRM and how we’re conditioning e-book buyers to act like illegal music downloaders.

America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire
The Wall Street Journal’s Mark Penn writes a laughably implausible article on how all us bloggers are getting rich. Makes me want to load up the truck and move to Beverly. The comments on his article set him straight, as have other bloggers.

Ford Bets the Fiesta on Social Networking
Ford gives 100 “millenials” a car and makes them Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr about their experiences. Do companies really expect efforts like this to work? If only they’d read this article first, This is how Social Media really works:

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

And finishing up with some follow-up to my recent Twitter rant, we have Maureen Dowd calling Twitter, “a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls” (found via The Intersection), web-strategist Jeremiah Owyang predicting that alpha-geek early adopters will move on to the next thing as Twitter enters the mainstream, and best of all, the genius of Keith Starky Explains Twitter an in-depth analysis of what Twitterers are really saying with the medium.

This week saw some interesting criticisms of Twitter, which helped reinforce some of my own biases against bothering with it. Science blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum weighed in on her oath to never use Twitter:

Welcome to generation ADD….Privacy is so last millenium.
Well call me old fashioned, but I draw the line at Twitter. Yes folks, the rumors are true. Physioprof and I have made a pact. We will never ever Twitter. It’s time to slow things down a notch. We want to enjoy a few moments disconnected. No electricity required, batteries not included.

Elsewhere, Clay Shirky has an introspective piece about the fallout from Amazon’s recent glitch where “adult”material was removed from their ranking systems, which led to widespread furor in the Twittersphere that discrimination was afoot:

Though the #amazonfail event is important for several reasons, I can’t write about it dispassionately, because I was an enthusiastic participant in its use on Sunday. I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true…Those are good conversations to have, we need to have them, but they are not conversations that would enrage thousands of people in the space of a few hours and kick off calls for boycotts and worse.”

Twitter is essentially a public Instant Messaging (IM) system, one where your messages can be read by anyone interested, and you can join in the conversation anyone else is having. For me, that’s the main reason I find the concept unappealing–I’ve never been a big fan of IM. I tried to give it a go back in the days of AOL/IM and found it incredibly annoying. Even with a limited group of contacts, the constant chiming from my desktop was so distracting and interruptive that I found it difficult to get anything done. Twitter strikes me as the same thing multiplied by several powers of ten. I screen my calls as well, by the way.

I know, I know, I’m missing out and I’m an old fogey stuck in the past. So be it. We each have our own time constraints and workflows. I do understand the appeal of chatting online with strangers. I used to be a huge user of usenet back in the day, and enjoyed being a part of the community discussing my favorite basketball team or whatever tv show/music I was listening to at the time. But that was back when I was very early in my graduate career, was still working my way into a research project, and had time to kill. As we get older and gain responsibilities, both career and family, time for such things gets smaller and smaller. As I progressed through graduate school and got closer and closer to my degree, my time spent in newsgroups grew smaller and smaller until I abandoned them altogether. And that’s something that worries me about most of these Web 2.0 mediums (media?) for science–that they’re going to be dominated and used mostly by those with the most time on their hands, and subsequently the least interesting things to say. Here’s a good example of someone reaching the tipping point, realizing where blogging stands in his list of priorities and considering letting it go.

Kirshenbaum makes good points about both the banality of much of what’s posted, and the exhibitionism and odd willingness to give up all sense of privacy by many users. I’ve written about boundaries before, they’re important, and you won’t find me going on about my private life or family in this blog. I don’t have a Facebook or Myspace page. It’s really none of your business. The linked Wired article in that previous blog posting should give you a sense of how easy it is to connect geo-tagged information to the real world, and I expect we’ll see some unpleasant incidents in the near future that begin to change attitudes towards being so open.

There’s also a certain laziness that Twitter seems to breed. While one constantly reads about the incredible discipline needed to edit posts to 140 characters, no one seems to mention the massive quantity of those disciplined 140 character messages that are generated. Merlin Mann describes it as “raging id”. I don’t really have the time nor the desire to read an unchecked stream of consciousness from most people. Several of the bloggers whose writing I enjoy are spending more time on Twitter than on their blogs as of late (John Hodgman for one, Neil Gaiman for another). While both are superb writers, neither generates anything I’m interested in reading via Twitter. I do understand why we’re seeing this shift, it’s easier to just spew out a thought off the top of your head than to sit and spend an hour (or hours) fully fleshing out an idea. Which is why I think it’s a lazy medium (I’m not alone in this). Even famous and talented folks just aren’t all that exciting and clever if you’re being hit with a splatter of every single thought they have. If you want my valuable attention, then you need to do a little work Edit it down, keep the good bits, and develop those ideas further. The raw material is just blather, and frankly, I don’t have a lot of time to listen to other people blathering. You’re just not that interesting.

The other noted advantage of Twitter is the “timeliness”. You can find rave after rave about how we learned about the plane landing in the Hudson or the Mumbai crisis from Twitter before the news networks had full reports on what was happening. So what. Unless you had a relative on that plane or staying in that hotel, would it have affected your life if you had to wait a few hours before knowing the story there? Kirshenbaum calls this “Generation ADD” (I prefer “Generation Now”). I guess this rampant voyeurism is the counterbalance to the rampant exhibitionism mentioned above. Shirky’s article points out how this immediacy can lead to sweeping mob movements based on incorrect and incomplete information. Amazon has apparently suffered from a threatened boycott and massive amounts of negative publicity based on false assumptions.

Even those heavily invested in Twitter advise that you shouldn’t try to read everything, that you should take time off. I’ve been told repeatedly that the key to managing information flow in this day and age is the use of powerful filters, perhaps the most powerful being that you don’t have to join in and use every technology simply because it exists. Usenet, in its time, was highly influential and great fun. But no, you’re not suffering now because you didn’t use it. Something else came along and replaced it, and something then replaced that. If you have the time and interest to join in, well, good for you. It’s an investment I can’t make and it’s good to know I’m not alone in this.

I’ll leave you with this funny, but impressively accurate list of Why Twitter is Evil.

April’s issue of Cold Spring Harbor Protocols introduces, well, re-introduces two longstanding experimental model systems, the snail (Ilyanassa obsoleta) and the leech (Helobdella).

The use of Ilyanassa in the laboratory dates back to the 1890’s, and it was a favorite of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s in the 1930’s. As a member of the Lophotrochozoa, a group made up of nearly one third of the animal phyla, the snail exhibits a spiralian developmental program. In addition to its use to study spiral cleavage, Ilyanassa is also used to study asymetric cell division and other phenomena:

It is an important model for studies of metamorphosis, the ecology of parasitism, and imposex, a striking morphological disorder caused by the disruption of sexual endocrine systems by environmental contaminants. Ilyanassa is also useful for studies of comparative neurobiology.

Protocols are provided for Obtaining Embryos, Induction of Larval Metamorphosis, Fixation, Isolation of Genomic DNA, Protein Isolation, and Pressure Injection.

In the 1870’s, C.O. Whitman, director of the MBL at Woods Hole used a local leech species for developmental biology studies. Gunther Stent’s lab used leeches for neurobiology research in the 1970’s. Like Ilyanassa, leeches are Lophotrochozoans and exhibit spiral cleavage and thus are useful species for studying this poorly understood program of development. Leeches are also used for the study of segmentation, regeneration and neurogenesis.

Protocols are provided for Handling Embryos, Microinjection, Devitellinization, Silver Staining, Immunohistochemistry, In Situ Hybridization, and Preparation for Microscopy.

For more emerging (and re-emerging) model systems, these articles and others like them are collected in Volume 1 of a new laboratory manual series.

One of the reasons Cold Spring Harbor Protocols exists is to allow us to keep valuable information available after the books where it was published go out of print. One of April’s featured articles, Optimization and Troubleshooting in PCR, is a great example of this.

Our PCR Primer manual has gone out of print, but the contents are still relevant and important to researchers in many labs. PCR is often difficult to optimize, and failure to do so can lead to undefined and unwanted products, or a complete lack of amplification altogether. To help avoid these issues, Kenneth Roux from Florida State University wrote the chapter that has been adapted for publication here. The article addresses various optimization strategies including touchdown PCR and hot-start PCR. Magnesium concentration, buffer pH, and cycling conditions are also considered. Like all our featured articles, Optimization and Troubleshooting in PCR is freely accessible to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

This joins our collection of other valuable articles from PCR Primer like PCR Primer Design, Strategies for Overcoming PCR Inhibition, and Setting Up a PCR Laboratory. A complete listing of our PCR-related articles can be found here.

I sort of feel like this blog has taken a negative turn as of late–I’ve been busier shooting down what I see as hype and impracticality lately than I have been at presenting positive suggestions. With that in mind, AJ Cann at the Science of the Invisible blog has given us the following homework assignment:

Compare and contrast Crotty’s “Magical Thinking” response to open content with Ellis’ attitudes to “(Selling) content in a networked age“. From the perspective of a contemporary observer, use these examples to illustrate the “content wars” of the early 21st century and explain how our present concept of ownership emerged.

So here’s my essay to complete the assignment. Hopefully this will be graded on a curve. Since I’m just auditing this course, I’m going to ignore the second half of the assignment on “content wars” (there’s a loaded phrase just waiting to inflame the passionate) and concentrate on comparing and contrasting the articles:

The two articles are philosophically similar. They share a common message, that giving away the fruits of one’s labors in a haphazard and thoughtless manner is not sustainable. Both argue that authors and publishers should see some reward for their work. Crotty’s essay is more limited, he’s merely pointing out the impracticalities of the “everything should be free” argument, while Ellis’ is more forward-thinking in suggesting ways that some material can be given away freely in order to generate even greater financial recompense for the author’s work. It should be pointed out that in other blog entries, Crotty, like Ellis, suggests that new business models and new ways of handling content should be experimented with. Crotty, in fact, runs a scientific journal that is performing a set of those experiments (discussed below).

Though Crotty’s piece is more limited, it does not suffer some of the weaknesses of Ellis’. Ellis’ essay is reminiscent of this piece in some ways, he’s describing a problem that’s fairly obvious, but doesn’t offer practical solutions other than to try a bunch of stuff and maybe some of it will work. That’s a common thread seen these days in the blogosphere and there’s not a whole lot that’s new offered by Ellis. Original thinking is needed here to invent new business models, and merely pointing out that experimentation is necessary is not terribly insightful. “Free PDFs/Paid books” is not a viable option for a scientific journal, where the lifeblood is the pdf itself. Ellis suggests that experiments need to take place in a manner where their results can be directly measured, but this is easier said than done, and again, no practical solutions are offered. Often it’s difficult to directly correlate a marketing activity with sales activity. For an example, at CSH Protocols, we make a portion of our articles freely available each month. These articles certainly see a higher readership than most (but not all) of our subscriber-only articles. But do they lead to increased institutional subscriptions? It’s hard to say. We’re certainly steadily increasing our subscriber base, but there’s no way to measure the direct effect of the free articles on this. I suppose we could eliminate the free articles for a period and look for a decrease in subscription uptake, but that seems like shooting ourselves in the foot just to prove a point (or to mix a metaphor).

So what are Crotty and colleagues at CSHL Press doing that’s a positive approach despite all of his negative articles on why other people are wrong? Let’s take a look at the journal he currently runs, Cold Spring Harbor Protocols. First off, the journal itself is an experiment, an attempt to move a 30-plus year scientific manual publishing program out of the print world and into the electronic world. CSHL Press has long been well-known for the high quality laboratory manuals published, but younger students are less likely to seek experimental methods on the lab’s bookshelf, they want to find them online. Hence, the journal was created in mid-2006. Taking advantage of the electronic medium, the protocols in the journal are regularly updated when needed, and all share a common database of cautions and recipes that are under constant revision.

CSH Protocols also experiments heavily with giving away content for free. Approximately 10% of the total journal content is made permanently freely available to all readers, suscribers and non-subscribers alike. Each month, two articles are chosen as “featured articles” by the editor and these are available to all. As noted above, it’s unclear how this has affected subscriptions, though it’s probably safe to say that it hasn’t hurt them. At the same time, it’s increased the size of our readership (the free articles are usually read more often than most subscription-only articles), increased the number of places linking to the journal (which helps for Google rankings), and increased the readership of subscription-only articles that are linked within the free articles (this is a good example, as the related articles linked within see high levels of activity). The increased readership is good for impressing potential advertisers, and it certainly doesn’t hurt when trying to sell the journal to librarians.

Further free distribution happens with the print version of CSH Protocols. A limited print run of copies of each issue are generated, and these are given away freely as promotional items at all Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meetings, and in the CSHL Press booth at other meetings.

The other big experiment happening with CSH Protocols is the revenue-sharing relationship between the publisher and the authors. Writing up experimental methods is not an immediate priority for most researchers. Data-driven papers reporting results are the heart and soul of an academic or industry career, and that’s always going to come first. In creating the journal, we were looking for ways to help motivate scientists to write up their methods for us. Our efforts have taken several different approaches. First, CSH Protocols has no page charges and no charges for the use of color. Authors do not have to pay to publish in the journal. Second, we offer an intense level of editorial support. Since the journal comes from our manual publishing program, we’re trying to maintain the same high standards of quality that built our reputation in our books. When you put together a lab manual, you want all the protocols to follow a common, easy-to-use format, and to be as complete and clear as possible. To keep things at this high level, all articles in CSH Protocols go through extensive developmental editing. We even go so far in some cases as to take an author’s rough step-by-step lab notes for doing a method and rework it into our article format for completion by the author. Both these things increase our editorial overhead, but we feel they lead to better quality submissions and better quality final articles. They’re the kinds of things a publisher can do to add value to an author’s work, the kinds of things that make paying a subscription worthwhile for the readers. When one is competing against free resources, quality is an area where one can certainly stand out from the alternatives.

But most importantly, CSH Protocols pays authors a royalty based on the usage of their articles. Each article has been tagged for the set of authors, and each year, a portion of subscription revenue similar to the royalty percentage paid a book author is set aside. This amount is divided based on each article’s percentage of total use on the site (full text access only, we don’t include abstract reads). Often this doesn’t amount to a huge royalty, we’ve paid some authors less than $10 for a year’s royalties (though to be fair, those articles are usually the ones published late in a calendar year so they don’t have time to accumulate reads). But for some authors, articles generate several hundred dollars per year. That may not seem like much to a high end PI, but for a graduate student living on a stipend, it’s a lovely thing. It’s not clear how much of a motivating factor the royalties are, but we have had quite a number of repeat authors. I’d be willing to bet the lack of page charges is more significant in authors agreeing to write for us, but the royalty check once a year is a nice reminder to think about other methods they could publish.

So, to wrap up this lengthy assay, the authors of both pieces seem to have much in common with their approaches to the future of publishing. While Crotty comes off as a naysaying curmudgeon, and Ellis offers positive thoughts about pathways into the future, Crotty is actually doing the experimentation that Ellis vaguely suggests, and is attempting to try innovative new ways of scholarly publishing. Or so he hopes. He’s gotten a little full of himself and is now referring to himself in the third person. AJ, this is your fault for assigning this essay, and I hope you can live with the consequences.

What at first seemed to be an odd April Fool’s joke turned out to be real–the Journal of Visual Explanations (JOVE) has gone from an open access publishing model to a closed access subscription model. No official statement was made, but on Noah Gray’s blog, JOVE’s Moishe Pritsker made the following statement:

“We (JoVE) are changing our model, and from now will provide our content under subscription. Until now it was all for free.

The reason is simple: we have to survive. To cover costs of our operations, to break even, we have to charge $6,000 per video article. This is to cover costs of the video-production and technological infrastructure for video-publication, which are higher than in traditional text-only publishing. Academic labs cannot pay $6,000 per article, and therefore we have to find other sources to cover the costs.

As much as I would like to continue to provide our content for free, JoVE has to survive. I believe the world would be a better place having a video-publication under subscription than not having a video-publication at all.”

More details can be found on this Friendfeed thread:

“…we are indeed closing access. Not an April Fool’s joke. We’ve been trying to get universities to subscribe to us, but nobody seems to be taking us seriously and, given our situation, being free is just not sustainable.”

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. JOVE set themselves a monumental task, trying to break ground with a new type of science publishing AND at the same time trying to do so with an unproven business model. Doing both together was perhaps a bit too ambitious. I can think of several reasons why open access wasn’t going to cut it for them:
1) their insistence on high production values–the only journals I know that are sustainable/profitable using an author-pays open access model are those that emphasize high quantities of publication and minimal editorial oversight and support. By striving for high production values, JOVE added significant editorial overhead and costs.
2) A large number of JOVE’s publications are demonstrations of techniques. As the editor of a methods journal, I’m painfully aware of the “second-class citizen” attitude most scientists take toward writing up methods. Obviously data papers are the bread and butter of the working scientist–that’s where they’re going to advance their careers. Methods papers are a nice addendum, but they are not a priority. It’s hard to get scientists to write up methods, and much of my time is spent trying to commission articles. At CSH Protocols, we go so far as to pay our authors a royalty as an incentive for writing up methods for publication with us. I find it hard to believe that there will be very many willing to not only spend the time to put together a video of a method, but willing to pay JOVE’s costs to do so.

And so the economic realities seem to have hit home. I wish the best to JOVE, the folks I’ve met from the journal are all smart, nice people and their experiment is an intriguing one. I worry though, that so much of their support and hype came from the small but very vocal group of open access proponents so prevalent online. This shift in business models may not be taken very well by that community.

Along with new cutting-edge methods, Cold Spring Harbor Protocols is home to an in-depth library of basic laboratory methods. The just-released April issue features articles that exemplify the attention to lab standard techniques.

Dye Loading with Patch Pipettes from Arthur Konnerth and colleagues from the Institut fur Physiologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, describes the loading of individual cells with fluorescent probes via patch pipettes. This method allows for combined electrophysiological and optical measurements at a quantitative level. The patch-clamp methodology has been successful for single-cell dye labeling in cultured neurons, brain slices, and in vivo preparations. A wide range of dyes can be loaded using this method, including probes for morphological reconstruction, ion-sensitive indicator dyes for monitoring second-messenger cascades, and dye-labeled proteins for fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), and fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) studies. The most widespread application of this technique has been for Ca2+ imaging.

Like all our featured articles, Dye Loading with Patch Pipettes is freely available to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

Given that today is April 1, which is always a good day to avoid the internet (so many attempts to be funny and clever, so few successes), I was surprised to come across two of the more perceptive articles on science publishing that I’ve seen for quite a while. If you got all your information from the science blogosphere, you’d be under the impression that all publishers are inherently evil, that they add no value whatsoever to anything, that scientists have an infinite supply of free time and that they’ll happily pitch in and do all of your work for you. So it was nice to see Larry Moran’s latest blog entry where he talks about the really hard (and expensive) work that goes into creating a textbook.

Moran cites a recent PLOS book review, where Sean Eddy takes the “information wants to be free” crowd to task for what he calls “magical thinking”:

“A more utopian “open” advocacy simply denies this real-world tension. Information wants to be free; corporations are evil; people will make great stuff for love not money; free stuff will save the developing world; we’ll pay for it with taxes and charity. You don’t have to subscribe to Ayn Rand’s brand of laissez-faire capitalism to have serious problems with this. It amounts to claiming that intellectual work doesn’t take time, or that time isn’t worth money—that intellectual property protections exist only to create profit for unnecessary middlemen, not to enable the work of talented professionals who create works that can be readily copied.”

The review discusses a new book on open education resources, and Eddy notes how woefully inadequate so many of them are, primarily because it takes time, effort and money to turn rough class notes into a truly useful educational tool:

“Nonetheless, when I actually went to these sites, it became clear how far they have to go before they can compete with a good book. Too many resources I saw were sketchy, incomplete, and unsatisfying…Distributing open-source software or open-access literature is only a matter of attaching an open license to a finished product, but most of an educator’s course materials are rarely a finished, free-standing work. Course materials are more usually fragmentary, cobbled-together aide-mémoires that only make sense in the context of face time in the course. A lot of work must go into each piece of content to raise it to the quality of textbook material, and yet more work is required to have the material best use the interactive capabilities of the Web.”

Moran takes up this theme to discuss his own textbook:

“Life is never as simple as the Web 2.0 fans make out. Somebody is going to have to do a lot of work before the quality of a website matches what’s in the best introductory textbooks. And it’s extremely naive to think that all that work is just going to be given away for free.

I’m not just talking about authors. There’s a whole team of people involved in publishing my textbooks. This includes editors who correct my spelling and grammar—an onerous task in my case. It includes artists who make the figures and editors who obtain permissions and copyrights for photographs. Then there’s the staff at the publishers who receive and mail out manuscripts for review and editing and who handle all the paperwork/electrons associated with a major project.

Are we going to ask all of them to work for free by putting everything on the web? Of course not.”

Of all the books I’ve worked on at CSHL Press, the textbooks are by far the most time-consuming, and the hardest to do well. A really well-done textbook takes an inordinate amount of editorial oversight. For example, taking chapters written by multiple authors and editing them so there’s a consistent voice throughout the entire book is no easy task. You want all of the illustrations to be done in the same style, again for consistency so a student can extrapolate between chapters, and that means hiring an illustrator for the book. These are just a few tiny factors in the big picture–a lot of hard work goes into creating a good textbook, and the people involved should see some recompense for that work.

Now, you can argue that the textbook market is a strange place, to be sure, and that big corporate publshers often do shady things in that market in the name of increased profit. And that there are some awful textbooks out there. No argument here. But expecting to replace all the hard work done on a textbook with some fuzzy entity called “the crowd” who will be doing the work out of the kindness of its heart, and thinking you’ll end up with as high quality a textbook as one put together by talented professionals is ludicrous. More from Eddy:

“Many technologists today are infected with an idea that “community is king,” that high-quality content will rain down freely merely because we connect digital communities openly. This confuses ways of sharing ideas with ways of creating ideas. It is a kind of magical thinking that has much in common with the cargo cults that cut landing strips in the jungle and carved radios from sticks in hope that more sophisticated beings would parachute technological artifacts down upon them.”

Talented people who work hard deserve to get paid for that work.

Addendum--note the comment on Moran’s blog from “anonymous” who suggests Moran just get a government grant to make his textbook free. Now, I’m sure all you scientist out there know how easy it is to procure government grants these days, right? And where does that government grant money come from anyway?

Addendum 2–how’s that textbook crowdsourcing effort in Texas working out?