RE: Darnton on the Google settlement

[Jean-Claude Guedon <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

>From the standpoint of scholarship, if the facts are correct, the 
arguments well built and the references accurate, the rest is 
frill. It is not a case of the bad driving out the good; it is a 
case of the cheap driving out the luxury and the expense 
associated with forms of perfection that ought to emerge only 
after essential needs are fulfilled, and only then.

I suspect that most scholars and scientists (particularly 
scientists) would rather have access to exhaustive collections of 
articles with a few blemishes (spelling errors and a few poorly 
constructed sentences) than access to only x % of the same 
collections, but with impeccable copy editing. In any case, no 
one has access to exhaustive collections of scholarly articles, 
and we certainly do not enjoy near-perfect copy editing. Presses 
have been forced to drive out good editing in order to save 
money, and, as a result, the present state of copy editing is 
rather pitiful to say the least. Yet, scholarship and science 
still hum along rather nicely.

People in poorer institutions and countries will agree even more 
because, their case, the "x" in x % is small and even vanishingly 
small.

Jean-Claude Guedon

PS By now, this thread lies very far from the legitimate worries 
so well expressed by Bob Darnton in his recent NYRB article on 
the Google agreement. Pity!


Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> The point is that the Harvard and other such initiatives are 
> fostering a culture of relying for most uses on the worse 
> versions of articles when better versions exist. That only 
> reinforces the flattening effect of Internet availability on 
> quality in scholarship: whatever is most readily, and most 
> cheaply, available will be preferred for all but perhaps 
> archival purposes. Is this another application of Gresham's 
> law, viz., the bad driving out the good?
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press