0.17 Culture, value, and communication

Culture, value, and communication

The European Commission’s Web site Knowledge Society

Our society is now defined as the “Information Society”, a society in which low-cost information and ICT[Information and Communication Technology] are in general use, oras the “Knowledge (-based) Society”, to stress the fact that the most valuable asset is investment in intangible, human and socialcapital and that the key factors are knowledge and creativity. This new society presents great opportunities: it can mean newemployment possibilities, more fulfilling jobs, new tools for education and training, easier access to public services, increasedinclusion of disadvantaged people or regions.

One of the strategic goals set for Europe by the European Council is “to become the most competitive and dynamicknowledge-based economy in the world” by 2010. Clearly, other developed nations understand that economic growth is a function ofknowledge and creativity, and that information is increasingly the core asset held by companies, the key social good produced bygovernments, and the determining factor in individual quality of life.

A key component of the knowledge society is education, and education requires preservation of the record of thepast as well as ongoing scholarship and research. Education, scholarship, and research all require the sharing of data and thecommunication of results. The system of scholarly communication includes scholars, publishers, libraries, and readers. Readersreceive work that is produced by scholars using resources made available by publishers and held in or found through libraries.Scholars create value by doing research, thinking, and writing. Publishers add value through peer review, editing, and design.Libraries add value by collecting, organizing, and preserving scholarship, and, of course, by making it accessible. At leastthree economies are at work in this system:

• A prestige economy, primary for scholars and important but secondary for the other players
• A market economy, primary for publishers, usually not very important to scholars, and important but not primary forlibraries
• A subsidy economy, primary for libraries, which are subsidized by universities, less available to publishers than itused to be, and more important to scholars than they generally know

It should be no surprise that a system that comprises three different economies is difficult to operatesuccessfully. When it does work, it has a certain elegance: each party contributes from its own sense of mission, and each gets paidin its own currency. The system has not always worked this way, though, and it may not continue to work this way much longer: atpresent, there seems to be general agreement that the system is broken, or breaking.