Three Revolutions [ SLIDES ]

George Strawn from SPARC on Vimeo.

When you are in the midst of such rapid and seismic change as is happening now with how information is shared, it’s helpful to get some historical perspective on how other revolutions played out.

On the second day of the SPARC Digital Repositories conference in Baltimore, keynote speaker George Strawn, discussed the revolution of the PC, Internet and now the Web. Strawn is the director of the National Coordination Office (NCO) for the Federal government’s multiagency Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program.

“I’m the excited IT specialist looking in at the information revolution,” he said.

After the renaissances 50,000 years ago of the spoken language, 5,000 years ago with written language, 500 years ago with the advent of printed language, the past 50 years has been about the computer language revolution. “Some of us would argue we are going to see a new science renaissance,” said Strawn. “We are involved in some very interesting times.”

When looking at change, sometimes it happens with sustaining technology, providing a better solution for a given problem. The three most recent revolutions represent disruptive technology with a poorer solution to a given problem - PCs for computing, the Internet for telecommunications and the Web for publishing, said Strawn.

Since it starts out as a poorer solution, a disruptive technology may be ignored by providers and customers alike, said Strawn. But if it stays around as a solution to other problems, finds a niche, gets on a faster improvement track than the earlier technology, then it may disrupt the incumbents after it becomes a better, cheaper solution.

The PC revolution was based on the rapidly improving computer chip. Incumbent companies didn't like the low margins of PCs and did their best to ignore and suppress them, said Strawn. All but one mainframe and mini-computer maker (IBM) were put out of business by PC makers who created business plans based on volume to survive the lower PC prices and margins.

The beginnings of the Internet goes back to 1965 as a U.S. government-supported  experiment in packet switching technology. Fiber optic communications, developed by the telecom industry to improve telephone service, together with computer chips, became the enabling technologies that made packet switching "faster, cheaper and better" than circuit switching, explained Strawn.

Most telecom companies resisted the Internet, but the monopoly local phone service cash flow of the regional Bell operating companies (now consolidated into ATT and Verizon)  helped them survive and then to buy or bury most Internet providers, such as PSInet, UUnet, MCInet)..

“In this case, it’s the incumbents who survived. This revolution had a different outcome,” said Strawn. “The question is going to be to you all and publishers of world: How is the third revolution going to end?”

 In the 1980s, universities stopped buying large computers and started buying PCs and this caused researchers who needed large computers for simulations to lose their "scientific instruments," said Strawn. The National Academy of Science wrote a report saying NSF should create supercomputing centers to address this problem and that led to the Internet as we know it today.

While the Internet from the beginning provided e-access to computers, people and information, the “killer apps” of the Internet became email and the World Wide Web, said Strawn. The Web now provides a viable publishing model for news, encyclopedias, books and scholarly literature and a variety of business models are emerging.

“Having lived through these three revolutions, with one last backward glance I would say that after we’ve distributed thousands and millions of PCs and a ubiquitous network to tie them altogether, we now know the reason for doing that is the information,”  – it’s the info we are after… Information revolution is a pregnant with possibilities right now as the Internet was in 1990.”

In talking about Open Access, Strawn discussed the NIH public access policy and various universities with open-access initiatives. While the battle continues among some Congressional representatives as to the policy for federal agencies, it’s harder to shut down universities and institutional repositories – it is more of a distributed target to hold back progress, said Strawn.

In reviewing who is for and against Open Access, Strawn noted supporters were some legislators, some librarians, some scientists, especially those at poorer institutions and "visionaries." The camp against Open Access includes some legislators, some scientists, most publishers and many scientific societies. "The status quo always seeks to suppress the revolutionary potential of a new technology,” said Strawn. “The house in divided.”

Strawn said the question in Web publishing may not be free access versus paid access, but rather cheap access versus expensive access (PCs aren't free, and neither is the Internet:  but both are much cheaper than the earlier technologies they displaced.)

Publishers' current copyright advantage is similar to the telecom companies’ monopoly advantage, whereas mainframe and mini makers had no similar barrier to entry. “Can incumbent publishers use copyright to hang on until they can put in place practices and business models to embrace web publishing (and drastically lower prices) and be survivors like the telecom companies?” asked Strawn. Current copyright has been flexible enough to give rise to Creative Commons, he noted.

Looking at how publishers might be paid in the future, Strawn explained several options are being considered: A small subscription fee, micro per-use fees, advertiser pays, author pays, funding agency pays, university pays.

Web publishing might take a number of forms. Authors could submit articles directly to an "arXive." There could be "approved" reviewers for each subject area, who may review and rate articles related to their expertise. Public reviews could also be accommodated. Reviews and ratings could be displayed like results of book reviews on amazon.com and could become a new "million eyeballs" peer review system (approved and non-approved reviews being displayed separately)

As this sector expands, so might Web publisher services, said Strawn. "Publishers" will annotate articles with metadata and facilitate generalizing the concept of an article to include the supporting data sets, which will also be annotated to facilitate computer processing. Both text and data will be reusable (with attribution) to facilitate creation of new composite, generalized articles (derived works). These annotated articles and data will be "readable" by computers as well as humans.  New science (especially interdisciplinary science) will be mined from such annotated articles.

Strawn said he’s seen that done in an experimental system. “What a wonderful way of connecting the dots between multiple articles that could be in terms of promoting a new form of knowledge and discovery,” said Strawn.

In conclusion, Strawn said the PC revolution put incumbent computer makers out of business because they did not react fast enough to the revolutionary potential of the new chip technology. The Internet revolution stressed incumbent telecommunication providers, but they had the resources to hang on until they could adapt and provide the revolutionary technology.

“The Web publishing revolution will happen – or we could be more aggressive and say it is happening. It probably not just as I have described,” said Strawn. “The only question is:  Will there be new publishers or the old incumbents who have learn to eat their own lunch before someone else does?”

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