‘Who Owns Our Knowledge’ hardly matters if our knowledge has little value. Knowledge is received information and information is not like other goods. Information can be bought and sold, but not easily: it is hard to disclose what is for sale without giving it away in the process. A market economy is not really suited to information transactions. An enlightened society recognises the advantages of information being readily available to all so that the best use may be made of knowledge. But society is rarely enlightened, and knowledge has usually been restricted to the literate, typically in the Church and the Law. Without knowledge, the ploughman in Gray’s churchyard could never have realised his talents: ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.’ With universal literacy, Scottish agriculture thrived in the 18th century: without it, poverty and despair stalked rural England.

But the ability to make good use of knowledge has rarely determined its actual use. Wise rulers have sometimes welcomed skilled immigrants, but to exploit the wealth they could create rather than to recognise their right to knowledge. Societies have created such rights, but rights riddled with restrictions. Rights designed to encourage the sharing of knowledge for the creation of wealth are soon distorted to favour the rich and powerful. Copyright protection of expression now extends for 70 years beyond the death of the copyright holder, which is neither incentive for the dead to be creative, nor protection for the living to poor to assert their rights in court. Other intellectual property rights serve to make knowledge unusable: patents, for instance, are often taken out not to be worked, but to entangle competitors’ patents in thickets from which they will never emerge. The ‘inventive step’ essential to patent theory is lost to patent practice and national patent offices are now run like private businesses, encouraging as many applications as possible, many of which will grant rights to knowledge of no value to society.  

Academic publishing boasts that it provides society with scholarship. But scholarship is not rewarded as much as performance measures based on citations to the papers the academic publishes in journals. The competition that has replaced collegiality rewards authors for citation to their work rather than the work itself. And, unlike scholarship, citation is readily gamed; it is not uncommon for authors to cite papers they have never read in papers they have never written. Academic authors write to be counted rather than read, to generate data. Increasingly, the major academic publishers see themselves as information companies collecting analysing and selling data rather than publishers supplying knowledge. As with citations, there is little incentive to ensure the accuracy. For years, Elsevier’s Scopus has listed Prometheus as a Geography journal, which it is not. Prometheus is not unique; for example, Scopus lists Scientometrics as a Law journal and World Patent Information as Bioengineering journal. A decade ago, I wrote a paper about universities exploiting the fantasy of science parks called ‘Milking the myth’; I have been classified as a dairy scientist ever since. There is no correcting this nonsense: for 25 years I have been denying authorship of a book with the splendid title of Information Acumen: Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, whose genuine author must wonder why she is so seldom cited. The challenge to open access may be less to make knowledge freely available than to distinguish between knowledge of value to society and rubbish data.