Electronic Journals - The Grand Information Future

Published in 1996 in the Electronic Journal of Sociology, Electronic Journals: The Grand Information Future? stands as one of the earliest political-economic warnings about the impending commercial betrayal of digital scholarly communication. Here I documented how traditional publishers—exploiting the inelastic demand of academic libraries—engaged in predatory pricing (with some commercial houses raising costs by as much as 400% over a decade), while simultaneously launching aggressive ideological and market campaigns to discredit independent electronic journals as “amateur” ventures and to impose site licenses, pay-per-use technologies like NetBill, and bloated “first-copy” cost models designed to ensure that electronic publication remained as expensive as print. The article demonstrated that without organized collective resistance from scholars and libraries, the digital revolution would be captured by commercial interests, producing a two-tiered system where esoteric research disappeared behind individual paywalls and the scholarly commons collapsed. For the SpiritWiki project, this work is theoretically pivotal because it diagnosed the precise mechanisms of enclosure—monopoly pricing, gatekept prestige systems, and the commodification of knowledge—that the open-access, public-domain, stewardship model of SpiritWiki was engineered to dismantle, replacing predatory commercial control with accountable, scholar-directed knowledge production accessible at the speed of thought.

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