The role of information in science and society

Abstract

When the Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft was founded in Leipzig a hundred years ago today, on 4 April 1906, all was still right with the world as seen by publishers. The role of information for science and society was firmly established: the key medium was the book; the circle of buyers and users was clearly defined, and the market was undergoing continuous growth. Max Weber had interpreted knowledge as the capacity for social action. The production of knowledge was part of the routine of the educated classes, based on the humanist ideals of the universities and academic societies. Those, who were involved back then, could not have imagined, that a hundred years later, the dynamics of knowledge production would become the dominant control mechanism in society. Nor that public debate would no longer correspond to the production of knowledge. Cultures have always changed and developed their media; they have produced their own technical possibilities. And conversely, new technical possibilities have reacted upon the structure of science and culture and their development. It was already true a hundred years ago, that the users of books could by no means take on board all the information produced in print. But given today’s unprecedented supply of information and the ever widening gap between this supply, its value-adds and the search capabilities on one hand, and the human capacity for information retention on the other, “a technological drama is looming such as never experienced in this way before. When one day Google will have digitised the entire handed down stock of documents and writings held by libraries, users’ time budget will not extend to any other use of this than being able in turn to place their own products on the Internet and making them the object of intelligent search operations”, is the prediction from Henning Ritter in the Frankfurter Zeitung last week. Is this what scientific researchers and information processing publishers should be worried about? When last week the German federal government’s projected bill for the implementation of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Information Society clearly contradicted the Bern Convention and the EU directive by allowing libraries to offer digitised versions of books they do not even hold in a print format – to give one example – then a mood is sensed in society – Wulf D. von Lucius has described it as a fatal combination of the financial difficulties facing the German federal states, the open access movement and the attitude that science is paid for by the state anyway – and does not need to be financed for a second time through the sale of information. Christian Sprang will analyse it (pages 177–183). When leading legal experts in Germany, such as Reto M. Hilty last week, describe the title of the EU directive as “misleading to a high degree” because it is not “geared to the needs