On-Line Journals and Financial Firewalls

Description/Abstract

The final state toward which the learned journal literature is evolving in the age of networked hypermedia is as inevitable as it is optimal: Sooner or later, the entire corpus will be fully and freely accessible and navigable from the desk of any thinker in the world. The effects of this on the scope and pace of Learned Inquiry itself will be revolutionary, comparable only to the impact of three prior cognitive revolutions: the advent of speech itself, then writing, then print. Learned Inquiry, always communal and cumulative, will not only be immeasurably better informed, new findings percolating through minds and media almost instantaneously, but it will also become incomparably more interactive, with collaborative, creative, critical, and self-corrective cycles accelerable, potentially, almost to the speed of thought.