Tue, 01 Apr 2003 22:54:12 GMT

Koïchiro Matsuura, the Director-General of UNESCO, …. Koïchiro Matsuura, the Director-General of UNESCO, spoke at the recent Paris conference on Open Access. He has now put a summary of his UNESCO remarks online. Excerpt: “The new economic and technological environment is raising concerns about the erosion of access to certain information and knowledge whose free sharing facilitated scientific research and education in past decades.” [FOS News]

it didn't facilitate it. It provided for it. Without the free access to scientific information you should as well throw the whole concept of science away, remember Robert K. Merton's norms of science, communism of knowledge is central to the project. No one should own scientific knowledge, people should own the tertiary products of knowledge. Sometimes people think that I am too hardline on this topic, but come on knowledge is our business, we generate and provide knowledge to the world as scholars, without that, we should as well just go private.