Each scientist knows that it is very hard to find out relevant research manuals because many books are not digitized, and you need to spend a lot of time in libraries. Pirate sites also don’t help, as errors of search algorithms lead to the loss of important information. It causes a problem of entropy.
Our society has changed — today we don’t have enough time to handle all the information we get. Only a small number of people have access to knowledge. We no longer have a situation when someone writes news and the next day we read it in a newspaper, as today the world is much more dynamic. It provokes social inequality — high speed information exchange flows prevent us from effective education.
What to do to avoid going crazy? Vernadsky and Sakharov were right — knowledge has to be accessible. Firstly, it will solve issues related to the gap between social classes. Secondly, if communication is too fast, it would be better to focus on information that gives food for thought. It helps to fight with inequality. Just think of Lev Tolstoy who actually became a founder of an anti-copyright trend when he put some of his books in the public domain. It is important to remember this today because modern society is going to higher extremes. Where on one hand some people are getting more and more knowledge, while others are getting less.
Open license is a standard for the concept of science communication. Such projects as Wikipedia, "Kyberleninka" [an online science library-Ed.], arXiv.org are accessible thanks to the Creative Commons [an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share -Ed.].
Apart from making scientific works accessible by law there is the problem of safety of online sources. Have you ever had a problem when you cannot find a website that you visited recently? Or maybe you lost your files due to troubles with the server? It leads to the idea that hard copies are more reliable. Even if there is only a slight chance that you might lose data, it’s better to have a backup.
"I am sure that electronic communication devices are insecure tools for data storage. They require electric power and proper hardware that has limited service life," noted Mr. Zasursky.
To solve this problem one has to understand how library services deal with it. The expert offers to copy each document twice.
Mr. Zasursky talked about a project, made by him and his colleagues. It is a backup databank. Thanks to this, authors can save their work — each one will be identified and will have two copies.
Such projects as "Kyberleninka," the Association of Internet Publishers, the Science Reporter, the Information Culture and the No Registry supported the idea of the expert.
"We aim to make a new social contract for authors. If someone wants to share some information we can offer him or her a platform for saving it. In a couple of years we will be able to edit all the copies so as to update them together with original documents. I think in a few years we will make information important for cultural development more accessible."
