Inside HigherEd
December 14, 2009
Excerpts:
Can an information source that is free also be reliable? Or does the price of content always reflect its value? In higher education, this debate usually takes place in the context of academic publishing, where open access journals have emerged to challenge their pricey print predecessors. This mirrors a wider trend in media, where lean, Web-based, free-content outlets have begun supplanting newspapers, magazines, and other publications that depend on subscription revenue.
The same narrative is playing out in the world of scholarly reference works. Encyclopedia Britannica, the genre’s sturdiest brand, has been marginalized in the Internet age by Wikipedia and Google — tools it dismisses as untrustworthy. Quality, Britannica says, comes at a price: $69.95 per year for Web access, to be exact ($1,349 if you want the bound volumes). Professors, tending to agree, have debated whether and how their students should be allowed to use Wikipedia while lamenting the lazy research habits Google has enabled.
Meanwhile, a number of academic institutions are quietly trying to do what Britannica and others say can’t be done: build online encyclopedias that are rigorous, scholarly, and free to access.
