$Million-wise and $100 Trillion foolish – precise field technologies

Ariane, I am sure you did good work, but I have a few comments about your method of sharing. I hate to see good things locked up to benefit a few. Your group is $1 Million-wise and $100 Trillion foolish.Your book is so expensive, it is much easier to write my own using the Internet, and have the benefit of real time links from my notes. And, a much better understanding of the subject in global context. If you distilled the subject to clarify methods, issues, opportunities and best practices, it should link directly to resources, but paper cannot do that. You should have made a global open resource site, to encourage and enable.

It is not that paper is becoming obsolete, but that it should be in most Internet cases. Are you trying to contribute to global knowledge, or just enriching the publisher and meeting your paper quota for the year? Your publisher is hurting your whole group with their focus on the wrong things. They are finding things to package and sell, not helping global society. If they changed, the future might bless them.

The people involved in your project have skills that can do much good. But when they try to build and maintain monopoly on ideas, without looking at the whole of where these and related methods fit into global industries and evolution of methods — you miss global diffusion to where the methods might be most needed.

Your Springer method of “sharing with the world” is too narrow and too short sighted. A few dollars greed, means the diffusion stops in one step, not hundreds.

[ When I see “Utrecht”, I miss Nico Van Kampen. I am certain he would agree with me. ]

Cryo-ET is NOT “emerging”, it is a mature industry that has not diffused to its most important roles in human society. Springer is just going through the motions, doing their same old things, and hurting groups like yours.

Filed as ($1 Million-wise and $10 Trillion foolish – precise field technologies)

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation