Freedom From the Press
Published in The Technology Source in 1999, Freedom from the Press: Alternative Academic Publication Strategies and the True Potentials of Information Technology diagnoses why the promised electronic-journals revolution had stalled: rather than exploiting information technology to slash costs and democratize access, commercial and even non-profit publishers were forcing digital production into the old paper-based paradigm—preserving bloated subscription bureaucracies, access-control systems, and inflated “first-copy” cost models that kept scholarly communication slow, expensive, and institutionally gatekept. Here I argue that the true potential of IT can only be realized by thinking “outside the lines” of print-era production patterns, and he outlines ICAAP’s three-pronged strategy for doing so: leveraging economies of scale to centralize core infrastructure services (archiving, hosting, conferencing), exploiting XML-based markup (IXML) to deliver multiple output formats at negligible marginal cost, and distributing production through “centers of excellence” such as the Internet Applications Laboratory’s free limited-area search engines. The article demonstrates that eliminating subscription-management overhead, proprietary formatting, and commercial marketing apparatus can reduce production costs to roughly $300 per journal—free to editors—thereby proving that high-quality scholarly communication need not depend on predatory pricing or bureaucratic gatekeeping. For the SpiritWiki project, this work is theoretically foundational because it operationalized the transition from critique to construction: where Freedom from the Press proved that open markup, shared infrastructure, and volunteer stewardship could break the cost-and-access stranglehold of traditional publishing, SpiritWiki extends that logic into a fully realized, living knowledge ecosystem—replacing not merely the paper journal but the entire commercial enclosure apparatus with an open-access, public-domain, stewarded platform that moves knowledge at the speed of thought.