Research results in all manner of outputs. For three and a half centuries, a very prominent form of research output has been a delimited or demarcated textual description that is laid out in a relatively standardized way. That’s the research article.

The big changes of interest are the “meteoric” increase in authorship by our Chinese colleagues, and the enormous increase in research journals coming from India and also from Western publishers.

A useful overview of the data is presented in Elsevier’s Editors’ Update. See in particular “The Rise of Asia: A Research Profile”.

China, it is noted there, has 1.4 million researchers and compound growth of 24% per year over the past ten years in number of papers published. Hardly a week goes by, I find, that there is not an invitation to be an author or an editor or, often enough, to be editor-in-chief, of a new journal.

As always great change goes hand in hand with significant new opportunity.

Not just software is explored in my wide ranging article on this (see below). Research publishing is also, and the move towards open access in particular in the life sciences. I also deal with the scientific method, arguing that the scientific research process itself ought to be considered as an output of research, and a very important one too.

Fionn Murtagh,
“Intellectual Property in Publishing and Research: Open Access in Biotechnology, Life Sciences, and Software”,
CEPIS UPGRADE, The European Journal for the Informatics Processional, Vol. XI, issue no. 4, August 2010, pp. 50-64. Full issue of this journal at: http://www.cepis.org/upgrade/media/full.IV.20102.pdf

Unlike in France and Britain, in the 19th century the German lands witnessed an unparallelled knowledge explosion. In the year 1843 alone there were 14,000 new publications in German, which is, pro rata for population, about today’s level. About 1000 new publications were then appearing each year in Britain. The massive output in German included novels but was mostly scientific. Because of this, it is suggested that the underdeveloped, agricultural German lands caught up with the colonial powers in terms of technological and social development during the 19th century.

The British introduced copyright in 1710. Prussia did so in 1837. Copyright was a considerable time being established though in the German lands. The result was that in Britain, books were a luxury, produced in runs of up to 750 copies, bought by the rich and powerful, but also guaranteeing profits for publishing houses. In the German lands, a way was found to face down the lack of copyright and breaching of any and all ownership rights: a dual market was developed with inexpensive paperbacks to target first mover advantage, and to undercut copies made by others.

A most interesting market developed in practical and applied treatises and manuals in chemistry, mechanics, machines and production, optics, steel production, and other areas. Many professors supplemented their income through the huge demand for scientific and engineering knowledge of all sorts. This was the age that gave rise to the big industrialists, like Alfred Krupp and Werner von Siemens.

However as copyright came in increasingly from the 1840s onwards, and the cheap editions became less and less common, but prices went up and up, the generalizing of author rights was no substitute at all for what had been so lucrative beforehand for author and beneficial for reader, and for wider society.

Interesting perspectives. Could we have today anything like the possibility of markets and economic sectors “developed in practical and applied treatises and manuals”, based on open innovation models? The answer is clearly yes, considering all the crowd-sourced, web-based possibilities.

But in health, governance, education and other areas, we still have a considerable way to go, before quality of information and knowledge are what they should be. A job – a most inspiring job – needs to be done, to turn today’s 21st century innovation models, whether open or proprietary, into a deep and broad citizen science.

The book at issue here is Eckhard Höffner’s Geschichte und Wesen des Urheberrechts, Band 1, Band 2. Verlag Europäische Wirtschaft, München, 2010. A review is available in Der Spiegel and online in English.

“Government has two principle levers through which it can seek to regulate property development. The first is through fiscal policy with respect to regulating access to credit and determining taxation rates. The second is through planning policy and the zoning of land and the granting of planning permissions. Explanations of the Irish property bubble have focused almost exclusively on the former, and the role of the banks, tax incentive schemes, and the failures of financial regulators. To date, the role of the planning system in creating the property bubble has been little considered.”

In regard to transaction price information, an Irish Times editorial had this to say, on Saturday 14 August 2010:

“A property market that is undergoing a huge price adjustment … was never in greater need of accurate price information. … the public awaits right of access to national property sales data.”

Open, linked data and information relating to all aspects of planning and prices are desperately needed.