I have been blogging about chemistry and related topics since 2004. Since then I have had the chance to witness the rise of the chemistry blogosphere. What started as a small, loose collection of opinionated men and women has turned into a group of serious and well-informed bloggers who blog with authority and nuance. Partly because blogging about chemistry is not as attractive as blogging about cosmology or evolutionary biology, the chemistry blogosphere has relatively few blogs. However in my view this has also translated into an unusually high ratio of signal to noise. Speak to people who frequent this world and ask them who they think the good bloggers are, and you will usually hear lists of names that are not only similar but also exhaustive. My own contributions to this world have been very modest but there are others who have set high standards and who will undoubtedly continue to guide the high-quality discourse.

With this background in mind, I was a little disappointed to see a parting editorial by Rudy Baum who has served as editor-in-chief of Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN), the flagship publication of the American Chemical Society. C&EN has been the main source of chemical information and analysis for the chemical community for almost a hundred years. In his capacity Mr. Baum has contributed valuable input to the magazine. He has done an admirable job in keeping the whole enterprise together and has also been very active in interacting with the chemical community, including chemists who write blogs. In fact his own team of outstanding writers, scientists and journalists publish their own blog which has consistently produced insightful, high-quality content.

In his parting editorial Mr. Baum had the following words to say about blogs:

Technology has profoundly changed journalism during my tenure with C&EN. Much of the change has been positivewho can imagine doing research on a topic without access to the Internet?but the business model for journalism remains very much in a state of flux. The silly mantra, Information wants to be free, overlooks the fact that quality information requires effort, and effort costs money.

Blogs are all well and good, they add richness to the exchange of information, but they are not journalism, and they never will be.

Blogs also made an appearance in another discussion arising from a university librarys decision to cancel their subscription to ACS journals because of high prices. A post by the librarian about this was met with the following response by the ACSs Director of Public Affairs

We find little constructive dialogue can be had on blogs and other listservs where logic, balance, and common courtesy are not practiced and observed,

I would like to address the C&EN editorial first. I was not aware of the source of that silly mantra that information should be free until a few fellow bloggers pointed out that it originated with Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, the same lavish volume which inspired Steve Jobs during the early phases of his career. It was reiterated by Richard Stallman who started the open software movement at MIT. The quote is more subtle than what it appears in Mr. Baums editorial. The point is that throughout human history, for reasons related not just to cost but also to availability and censorship, information has had to tread the fine line between being withheld and being widely available. Stallman made it clear that by free he was not talking about the price but about availability. He was alluding to the fact that information by its very nature is like a restless beast that wants to spread around through the human medium. History has amply demonstrated the fact that we as a society want to know, and at some point we do. And Stallman was saying this in an age when the internet was still very limited and access to information was severely constrained compared to today.

The age has changed but information is still restricted or expensive in many cases where it should not be so. Unfortunately, simply quoting the information wants to be free gives the impression that consumers of information really think that it doesnt cost anything to produce it. Thats simply not true. Almost every person who I have talked to about open access realizes that it takes cost and effort to edit, referee and produce information. However we are also aware of how much cheaper this process can be compared to what it is, especially because of the exceedingly low costs of bandwidth and storage space. These low costs make it possible for enterprises to be supported mainly through volunteer donations. The fact is that journals and magazines as a whole are still mainly stuck in the old model where a group of editors make it their full-time job to finely craft, edit and publish information. Although the technology for disseminating information has changed, the mindsets find it hard to let go. There is of course still a prominent role for official high-quality information that is carefully vetted and journal editors still do an admirable job of striving for quality, but the fact is that there are now multiple ways of producing and accessing the same information, with blogging being one of the simplest. This proliferation of content creation and production channels has resulted in the entirely reasonable mantra that most information should be very cheap, and at least some information should be free.

The difference between free and cheap is huge; its the same as the difference between zero and any finite number. And its this mantra thatis the source of the campaign against publishers like Elsevier who practice unfair bundling and sport huge profit margins. More importantly though, I think theres at least some evidence to refute Mr. Baums statement that quality information requires effort, and effort costs money. By now Wikipedia has been proven to be a resounding example of the fact that quality can come without money through the efforts of millions of volunteers who contribute knowledge and information for a variety of reasons. Most of these contributors have contributed an immense amount of their time without asking us for a penny and the Wikipedia servers are mainly maintained through volunteer donations. Articles on Wikipedia have been vetted by experts in their respective areas (including Nature) and have been consistently found to contain high-quality information.

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Chemistry blogging and journalism: Eat the fruit, don't count the trees