It was pretty neat when the internet was young and you could find just about anything known to man somewhere on the internet for free, and Google would even show you the sites that had whatever you were looking for instead of some megacorp product page that’s possibly related. But the corpos didn’t want that reality, they wanted this one.
From Day 1 Google’s business model has been to show sponsored content before search results. You’re probably thinking about the search engines before them.
I’m talking about Google before they prioritized products pages and news corporations. When was the last time that you saw some small abstract site with the exact information you were looking for in the results on the first page? That used to be commonplace. Ads have always been on top, but that was only the first 1-2 listings & possibly some on the side, but the rest was sorted by relevancy, not by size and budget.
The problem would have been probably mitigated by had publishing in open access journals been more widespread among academics, where the papers would have a better chance at being copied and duplicated freely.
I wonder why this was never tackled by the author.
A youngman, Aaron Swarz, was pushed by major journals to end his life for attempting to practice digital preservation.
“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”
Isn’t this the natural state of things for the unprivileged majority of us that in the reality of publisher paywalls do not have access to the riches of Anglo-American research centres? Apparently Eve doesn’t know that libraries in the most of the world still struggle with paying fees to Springer. As a consequence, researchers in affiliated institutions do not have access to the corresponding published content.
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