Articles from this series
- Information science - Introduction
- Information science – Uniqueness and essential questions
- Information science – Philosophical approaches
- Information science – Paradigms
- Information science – Epistemologies
- Information science – What is information?
- Information science - Terminology (Knowledge, Document)
- Information science - Terminology (Collections, Databases, Relevance)
- Information science – Domain
- Information science – Organisations of information
- Information science - Information systems
- Information science – Informetrics
- Information science – Application of informetrics
- Information science – Information behaviour
- Information science – Theories of information behaviour
- Information science – Information behaviour of individuals and groups
- Information science – Changing context of communication of information
Main source
Introduction to Information Science - DAVID BAWDEN and LYN ROBINSON
Change of economic models
Back then everything was much easier. Whenever you wanted to buy a source of information it was physical object. Either a paper, a book, or a human being. The digitalization (explained in previous article) changed everything. Don’t take me wrong. From the perspective of information “virtual” objects are “physical” too. Virtual objects are always just bunch of information (energy) and at the end it doesn’t matter whether the energy forms a table, book, or data in our computers. Virtual is very much part of physical world, or also 1st Popper’s world (explained in “Epistemology” article).
There is though a difference. As of now, vast majority of the virtual data are not anchored to a blockchain. Therefore they are not unique (the metadata lacks the “unchangeable” unique code/key). This lead to only possible solution, which is buying “licences” that enable the purchaser to access the centralized platform where the data is stored. There it can be used however is desired. The point is, that instead of purchasing one unique copy of the product, the purchaser receives virtual copy of the product. There is a difference between unique physical object, unique virtual object and virtual copy…are we understood?
So if one buys the physical object, he has it until it’s destroyed. Also the expanses that have to be used in order to create a huge amount of unique physical objects are enormous. The virtual product is created once, and then it’s just copied wherever is needed. But when the licence expires, the former purchaser can no longer access the data that were at his disposal. Basically not using blockchain as the only usable global way of maintaining working copyright leads to number of problems. All those problems are fixed in a way that hinders the purchaser in some way (he is not able to download the copy at all, the copy has expiration date, etc.). There is basically no working smart contract that would take care of all the shit. If any science domain, the Information science would be the one studying blockchains. Unfortunately scientists still didn’t have enough time to incorporate blockchains where they are needed…we have to wait…
Open access
The book I take most of the information from only deals with Open access as means of distributing scientific articles. From my humble point of view, such an “elite” stance is complete bullshit. Open access data are all the data that do not require license to be accessed with. The information can be accessed when the source is found. Open access data are crucial. We all are using them every single day, mainly via google. Even though Open access data can be found manually, they usually are reached through central windows into “Open access repositories” (such as Google). Steemit is one perfect example of the Open data.
