Fake News are Free
— Science is Pay-Walled
You know, there is a strange link between sci-hub and fake news. Reminder: Sci-hub is a filesharing portal for pirated scientific papers. It was set up by a kazakhian scientist after she realised her university was too poor to provide her with access to state of the art publications (which, it turns out, are not so public after all). Sci-hub is now the No. 1 go-to-place for everyone deflected by paywalls of scientific publishers. Don’t get me wrong: This situation is by no means easy to judge. But in order to judge it, it may help to add the following perspective to the discussion.
The internet is an infrastructure that could provide all information to everyone. Ironically, we are putting some additional effort in (DRM and paywalls) in order to curtail and micro-manage access to that information. Publishers claim they are protecting creators. Others claim that knowledge should be public (especially when it was funded with public money in the first place).
This situation is in itself unfortunate. But here is what makes it outright absurd. I get painfully aware of it, when I see that for many of my students (of a similarly poor university) the World Wide Web, and especially Google’s search engines, is de facto their only source of information. And here is the problem with that: When you are surfing and searching the World Wide Web, there are basically three types of information. First, there is infomation that is hard to avoid. I know way more than I want about snow-men in Disney movies, or the spouses to heirs of a British throne that lost its power generations ago. Such information gets rubbed into your face. You have to make an effort to avoid it. Second, there is information that you have to actively search for. Such information is found on wikipedia and in other free compendia, and it can be gathered from people dispensing their more or less questionable expertise and personality on public forums and social media.
Information can also be taken from news pages trying to catch you. The line is blurred here: Respectable pages from The Guardian to Medium are trying to make you a paying member, so they can keep up their information gathering business. Or they use their content as bait to sell ads. Others, like FoxNews, are interested in spreading their brand of information. Sometimes, whether something is propaganda or not can be determined by the cost (both with regard to money and data) at which it is available.
Now, the third kind is the knowledge that actually requires work and expertise to produce: actual scholarship and science, and first-class teaching as well. This is arguably the best knowledge humanity has to offer. And it is doubtlessly the most cumbersome for humans to obtain. In short: You can get anything on the internet - except for really good information. Indeed the quality of information seems exactly reciprocal to its availability. The better the information is, the harder it is to get. And the worse it is, the more it wants to be gotten.
Yes, I am simplifying. But there is a grain of worrisome truth in this. We need to solve this, and it is not easy so solve. As a first step, let us agree that this situation is absurd. And if you don’t think so, then next time when you discuss with a climate sceptic, try to put your hands on the very studies that would prove them wrong.
