1 The social status of authors in Web 2.0
In the previous section it was explained that the content creators are exploited by the Web 2.0 business model. This description sounds a bit negative and it make sense to hear the other side. The advantage for the overall society is, that they have created a content machine which is working unpaid. The social status of a Youtuber in the society is zero. That means, he has to create hiqh quality content and even he is doing so, that society sees down to him. “He isn't a VIP, he is youtuber”. Web 2.0 has made the society stronger and lowered the status of the people who are creating the content and work for the society.
This asymmetric relationship is only available for classical Web 2.0 domains like blogging, image blogging, video clips and podcast. It is not working for high quality content like books and academic information. A web 2.0 community for book content is not available right now. If someone has published his new fiction book he becomes the status of an official author. That means, the society gives him endless money and the fans like to meet the star. The social status of a book author is much higher, than a blogger. The bookmarket is not operating under the Web 2.0 exploitation rules, but the authors are getting paid.
Individuals who are able to create high quality book content in the fiction or non-fiction domain are respected by the society. The reason is, that amount of authors is small and the overall society doesn't risk to make a joke about an author, especially not about content writers with an academic background. The problem is, that if the 10 million academic writers in the world who are sitting inside the ivory tower, are not longer motivated to create new papers, society wouldn't work anymore. The world is depended from educated individuals and as a result they are treated as kings and queens.
The situation in the Web 2.0 which consists of weblogs, image content and music production is much more relaxed. The number of worldwide musicians and photographs is endless. And the society doesn't give them respect. A blogger has the lowest possible status in the society. He can replaced quickly and his work is not treated as work but as his personal opinion. It seems, that high quality content like books and academic books are a natural barrier which prevents the introduction of a web 2.0 business model which will put the authors into a weak social role.
2 Business model of User generated content
The term “user exploitation” to describe the Web 2.0 phenomena is a bit harsh. The better idea is to ask neutral what the business model is. In contrast to widespread understanding, Web 2.0 is not primarily a technology which is based on RSS feedreaders and fast-loading internet sites but the main idea is a certain business concept. A web 2.0 company earns money in a certain way which is different from a Web 1.0 company. In most cases, it has to do with user generated content. A typical Web 2.0 company asks their user to upload content which is musik, podcasts, personal information, knowledge or blogposts. This increases the value of the website and makes it attractive for advertisement. Then the company is selling advertaisment to other companies and this produces money.
The bottleneck in Web 2.0 is the user generated content which is done without a salary. The company sees this as a natural ressource. Without the content the website isn't attractive and the company wouldn't earn money. The innovation is, not to pay for the content direct, but building the infrastructure which makes it more likely that the user can create the content. For example, Youtube has created an advanced upload feature, which makes it easy to upload a video. All codecs are supported, and the video is available after 1 second online. The overall process is working from a technical side perfect, this motivates the user to do the procedure many times.
The main problem what all Web 2.0 companies have in common is how to convince the user that they are creating the content. One option would be to show a message like “please upload a video for free”. But will the user follow this plea? Let us make short though experiment. We are setting up a new website and ask the user to post unique content. The danger is high, that nobody will do so, because there is no reason why.
The most surprising fact behind the Web 2.0 economy was that some companies have convinced the users in doing so. It's unclear what the secret is, but the users are uploading a large amount of content to the big websites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram and others. What these companies have in common is, that they are large companies with a huge amount of employees. These employees are creating the software and flagging the content. As a result, the users trust the company and are motivated to provide content for free.
From a formal perspective all the web 2.0 websites are content generators. Their feature is, that over a timespan the amount of information on the website is growing. The main idea behind Twitter, for example, is that each day new tweets are created. If the users of Twitter wouldn't create new content, the company would get in trouble. They would ask themself: Why are the users are boycotting us? Have they switched to an opponent? Is something wrong the technical infrastructure? Has our marketing a weakness? And if they can't answer the question, the company would loose it's role as a social network.
The most important question in the game is perhaps, how to motivate unknown Internet users in uploading large amount of content for free. If somebody has an answer, he can start a new Web 2.0 company. What we can recognize from the past, are examples which were not successful. Myspace for example, has struggled to motivate the users to upload anything.
3 The transformation of the ivory tower
The classical shielded ivory tower can be compared with Web 1.0 companies which dominated the landscape before social media was invented. The main idea was a clear border between the system and the environment. Only employees of Yahoo were allowed to edit the catalog of the websites but not normal users. The idea of Yahoo and other Web 1.0 companies was to provide a service for the society and in exchange the society has to pay for it.
We all know, that the Web 1.0 ecosystem failed, and the strict boundary between an internet company and the normal world isn't working anymore. In the recent Web 2.0 business model the idea is, that normal users (which are millions and more) are uploading the twitter postings and images to their social community and participate at the Internet. As a result the society is not paying anymore for the Internet, but the Internet is owned by the society.
Let us take a look at the academic system. Here a strict border between the system itself and the society is visible. The academic ecosystem provides a service for the world which are mostly lectures at the university, written books and papers and in exchange the society has to transfer money to the ivory tower. This is done usually with taxpayers money which is given to phd scholars, academic journals and research institutes. Similar to the situation in the Web 1.0 companies, the result is not very satisfying. The ivory tower and the normal society are separated which is increasing the costs. A prominent example are the total costs for creating a single paper. The costs are so high, that no one knows exactly what a single Arxiv paper will costs until it gets published on the server. The estimation goes from zero US$ as an naive estimation up to 0.5 million US$ which includes the cost for peer review, career planning of the authors and APC costs for a journal.
The transformation from Web 1.0 companies into modern Web 2.0 companies was not very difficult and it was done in less then 10 years. The transition from an isolated ivory tower into a participatory Open Science community will become more complicated. The reason is, that the content in academic papers is different from what the mainstream society is doing all the day. And it takes years until a single student is able to create a new paper from scratch.
Sometimes it is argued, that Open Science has to do with certain tools like fulltext search engines, electronic publication and online-forums with scientific knowledge. The more important measurable is the relationship between society and ivory tower. Who dominates the relationship? Who has to spend money for what? And who profits from it? The classical understanding can be described as an “ivory tower first” ideology. Which means, that the needs of academic researchers are very important and the society has to make sure, that the ivory tower is well equipped with ressources, money and knowledge. In the vision of Open Science the situation has flipped. That means, the society doesn't provide anything to the ivory but asks how to utilize the resource in the ivory tower.
4 The bottleneck in academic writing
The average student may think, that the university library has to much of books and that written knowledge is unlimited. He can grasp a book from the shelf and if doesn't like the author he can read a different one. But in reality, books and printed information are a rare product. It has a high price and creating the content is a demanding task. What the student sees in the library is only the result of a long workflow.
What the students doesn't know is, that each book in the shelf as a price tag. The average springer book costs around 100 US$ and this price doesn't include all the costs. In reality the price is much higher and Springer doesn't earn money with it but it looses money. To understand why book writing is so expensive we have to describe what efficiency is. The lastest technology available for creating a book is a modern wordprecessor, a state of the art reference manager and an academic search engine. An all digital workflow reduces to overall time of creating and revise the manuscript. But even this high end workflow will need a human author who is typing in the sentence. The time until a single US-letter page was typed in, added with references and corrected for grammar errors is around 5 hours. A simple 8 page long paper will need 8x5=40 hours and a 300 page textbook will need 300x5=1500 hours.
The problem is, that this amount of human workhours can't be reduced. Otherwise the quality would be lower. Writing a fictional book can be done a shorter time, but creating non-fiction academic content is a complicated task. And this is the measurement what trained authors need to invest of his time, a newbie would take more hours to reach the same result. This explains why the total number of books is restricted and why a single textbook in the library is so costly. Because in the book which the reader takes for free out the shelf at least 1500 hours were invested, probably more.