Thanks, Karen Needles, for emphasizing that free online access doesn't mean costless access. In the thread that has been progressing under the subject line "Research in the Digital Age," you wrote that "people expect to have everything on the Internet free." Then you carefully explained what the Lincoln Archives Digital Project has been doing, and what those efforts inescapably cost. 

Though this is a humanities forum, it might be useful to report from the world of science--another part of academe, after all--that the same dynamic now challenges scientific publishing, the basis and medium for scientific advance since shortly after Gutenberg. Science too sees a widespread urge, a compulsion, for information to be free--and scientific publishers too see something that calls to mind the belief of teenagers that money grows on trees in the backyard. 

Now, it is true that a scientist can simply publish her raw manuscript online for very little cost. It is also true that scientists themselves inherently desire information to be freely available--and that's including the scientists who operate not-for-profit scientific societies' publishing operations. And it is true that the Internet deletes portions of the cost of the scientific publishing enterprise.

But it is also true that it's easy to find journals whose quality rests on, for example, the presence of Ph.D.-level scientists serving as editors. These editors--who obviously cannot work for free--manage the extensive, complicated process of peer review and the transformation of raw manuscripts into archived permanent products in something that also has costs: science's evolving system for ensuring precise retrievability not only of papers but of data sets from inside the annually accumulating tsunami of work.

In other words, even in the digital age, and in some ways especially in the digital age, publishers add value. But a few voices in science have been extremely harsh and insistent that the added-value argument is bogus. 

I've oversimplified much and I've omitted much, but the underlying dynamic seems to me to correspond. So this note seemed to merit sending (even though it affords not a single opportunity to mention yet again Virginia's deplorable disrespect for sense of place at a certain historic landscape overlooking Hampton Roads and the lower Cheasapeake Bay, and figuring at or above the level of Monticello itself in American history). 

Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/science_and_the_media
Poquoson, Virginia

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