Science Business

The problem that Soros and the Open Access movement focused on (lack of free or cheap scientific journals) was unknown to me for apparent reasons until last year when I started writing my bachelor thesis.

First - I'd like to state out the more "extreme" problems with scientific journals today - students lack the ability to browse them, as the principles of searching (and outcomes) in systems like EBSCO etc are not similar to what we (or they) are used to use. For example - my 16 year old brother doesn't know how to search Google with aids (using *, ?. + etc) and rather just inputs the word and hopes on the search aid (Google recommendations). Imagine what will happen, if he enters the college (which I hope he does) and tries to use this decades-old system to search for knowledge left by us or persons before us.

The other problem is that there is no universal platform for searching these articles. Imagine, if with have to search the internet from 3 or 4 engines to get a good overview of the subject. Sure it can be done today, but who really uses anything else but Google? (ok, Bing?). And because of the lack of the platform we are left in the situation, where the search results in different databases offer plentiful of results (a great amount of results aka. articles) but just a small fraction of them is eventually fount out by me to be useful to me. Unfortunately.

And only now do i reach to the third problem which is of course the the cost of these journals. Science business at the root of itself is ill to me, as I despise the concept that one should pay money for scientific knowledge. Why? I guess the critique would be the cost of production and reviewing (both academic and linguistic).

I agree with the cost but they can be minimized. The cost of publishing for example can be null - we have options of free-ware software that can be used to publicize the knowledge over internet. If one would like to own a hard copy (for reasons unknown to me forever), then he or she should pay for it (by a price higher than expected). I'd like to point out here the article by Umberto Eco where the gentlemen bashes my dislike of materialized knowledge, but for many reasons I still dislike the idea of printed word.


The cost of linguistic reviewing should be left to the author to carry (with different software and personal linguistic reviewers).

The cost of reviewing the article should be null. Why would a scientist or a researcher take money to review an article? I see the review process being part of what defines a scientist. After all - he or she was on the same position when starting their scientific career. I know that we all are busy - let's execute the laws of economy here then - the options being that there should be then more scientist (reviewers) or the publications should decline (greater time-frame for publicizing). Although here my idea gets its greatest error - we like that the scientific articles get published so rapidly - this gives us more knowledge on fresher subjects.


So I guess to only reason why scientific journals should and would take money, is because of the pressure from the scientific society to get fresher and greater amount of information. Who pays for it, is left to decide by the society, but eventually we all pay for it anyway though taxes so it is here unimportant.

Is this a Digital Divide-causing factor? Of course it is. Martin Hallik from the University of Tartu Library has written many articles on the subject, basically stating that Estonian scientist would get dumber and e-Estonia would further decrease in its innovation because of the lack of funding in scientific journals database subscription.

Imagine what is the situation in Armenia? Tunisia? Zimbabwe?
The divide is and unfortunately will continue to grow.

Digital Divide in Estonia

Example of a digital divide
The best example of a Digital Divide in Estonia is between our parents and children. The situation is more astonishing as you think of all the painstaking changes the parents have had to live through already, and the government (society, etc.) forcing yet again this new - all-whelming digital world acceptance.

I'm not saying, that the gap is wide. Mostly all of the parents know how to use the internet, how to work there and how to apply the net as an entertainment source. But knowledge on scams, phishing, on-line-threats etc. is not equal between the two age-groups.

Availability of internet
This summer I had a huge fight with some of my girlfriends, whether or not internet is as common as air by it's availability. I was then convinced that there isn't a cottage in this country, where you would not at-least get GPRS service. Apparently I was wrong. My friends violently argued that in some villages in Estonia there is not even mobile service, more less internet. I still do believe though, that there is some sort of internet capability - whether KÕU, or WiMax or Elion-related services, but it is true, that in case the connection haven't been brought to the village by the provider, the cost to do that for the people living there is too expansive. This situation however widens the digital cap between our citizens.

The spread of internet in Estonia is good compared to countries in western Europe. But we can't compare us with them, because we a smaller country (easier to cover with net) and we have a different view on e-services (everything must be dealt with in the internet). Therefore I would say, the spread of internet over Estonia is not as good, as it should be, taking to account, what do we expect to be in terms of e-Estonia.

The solution? Government-subsidised country-wide wireless fidelity, with download capabilities as far as 0.5 Mbps (for now).