Open Letter to the Oxford University Press and Oxford English Dictionary
J’accuse 2.0: On some deficiencies in English Dictionaries and “The Press”
In 1984 the Oxford University Press (OUP), also known simply as “The Press”, launched the New Oxford English Dictionary Project in order to transfer dictionary source materials “from paper to an electronic medium”, and to bring the Dictionary into the “modern age”. [1]
British newspapers reported in 2010 that the various print editions of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) would no longer be updated.
'The print dictionary market is just disappearing - it is falling away by tens of per cent a year,' Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of Oxford University Press. [2]
The Press stated that the OED had never been commercially profitable, although it had sold millions of copies worldwide often with the words “best-selling” printed on the dust cover of some of its editions.
In 2022, anyone wishing or requiring the latest definitions of words from the Oxford English Dictionary, the authority on the meanings of words in the English language, must pay a £100 per year subscription to access the information.[3]
What began in 1984 has now resulted in a cornerstone of academic and cultural knowledge, the Dictionary, being locked up with bail set at £100 a year, forever.
The OUP’s ambitions “to take full advantage of this powerful and accessible medium” [4] have resulted in less people having access to this knowledge, not more. Despite the money saved by ditching print editions, it has increased the cost of entry!
It is a tragic irony that the OUP’s technological aspirations were formalised in 1984, thereby setting a stage for a Newspeak as described in the novel named after the same year.
The abandonment of print editions and the siloing of the current edition (OED3) behind a paywall encourages a centralised control and storage of our language, and denies us a transparent and chronological record of changes to definitions. When a definition changes on the website, how can you be sure it just changed, or not?
Now we must trust the ephemeral digital data on the OED website rather than the outdated dictionaries on our bookshelves. We can never own, we can only subscribe.
It doesn’t have to be this way and I urge you to remove your paywall and reconsider your business model for the Dictionary. You claim it has never been profitable, but at least it was accessible. Now it’s neither.
Were it not for the philanthropy of men and women, kings and queens, the Oxford English Dictionary would not exist.
If the abandonment of the print editions is purely a commercial matter, let’s take a look at the University’s finances.
The Oxford University Press is a department of Oxford University.
Oxford University has endowment assets worth £1.3 billion. Individual colleges have their own endowment assets, which amount to £5.06 billion. In 2021 The University had an income of £2.4 billion, and an educational publishing income of £694 million.[5][6]
St John's College, Oxford, is the wealthiest of the 36 colleges, with an endowment of £600 million. This wealth is mostly attributed to nineteenth-century suburban development of land in the city of Oxford of which it is the ground landlord [7][8]. Its lands and buildings, like many other Oxford colleges, were bought and endowed by individuals seeking to establish charitable institutions for the education of students.[9]
The value of Oxford University and its Colleges endowments are much greater than reported since the figures do not include the worth of their buildings, or the many arts and treasures they house.[10]
Oxford University Endowment Management (OUem) is a commercial operating subsidiary of the University of Oxford formed in 2007. It was set up so that the University and its Colleges could make investments using their endowments as collateral. The OUem has returned 10.9% annualised over ten years and distributed £1.1 billion since inception.[11]
In addition, The University has received over £3 billion in donations since 2000 from organisations such as the Wellcome Trust, the Andrew W. Melon Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as private individuals. [12]
Research is another source of revenue for Oxford University, and selling University research and innovation to private firms is routine. On August 4th 2022, The University announced its most recent deal: “Oxford spinout MiroBio acquired by Gilead Sciences for $405m”. [13]
The OED is one of hundreds of books you publish but no longer print. The Press is profitable and every year you release thousands of books.
Given the extraordinary wealth of the University and The Press, any discussions about “profit” when it comes to the Dictionary should be irrelevant. Focusing on profit when you have such vast resources is disrespectful to the countless contributions of volunteers and philanthropists without whom this “living document” would not exist.
Charging people a whopping £100 per year for access is a disgrace.
J’accuse 2.0
I accuse you, the editors of the Oxford University Press and Oxford English Dictionary, of failing to deliver on your principle public duty: to spread the usage and understanding of the English language.
The methods you’ve selected are centralised, opaque, and paywalled - all the characteristics of Web 2.0. The Press’s digital strategy for The Dictionary only increases the divide between the information rich and information poor [14]
An updated print edition should be instantiated, but in lieu we must at least look to better technologies to record, store and distribute this body of knowledge.
Consider a book and its many revisions as a chain of records or events. Each revision references the book which precedes it in a series of published events which are immutably linked in chronological order, and stored on bookshelves. Scholars in future must be able to reference what words mean to us today (and in 10 or 100 years) as they were once able to consulting the print editions stored across the world in many different libraries.
Now consider a blockchain.
At Project Dara [15] we have already saved tens of thousands of dictionary definitions on a blockchain. They are immutably recorded on a distributed and decentralized ledger which is censorship-resistant and tamper-proof, and there are no hosting costs once recorded on-chain. Our dictionary-on-a-blockchain is a working proof-of-concept, freely available to anyone in the world with zero-barrier to entry. It can be read at saveaword.com.
We’ve developed and rolled out our dictionary, which we call Felix, for less than 10 thousand pounds, and its users have saved over 30,000 words and their definitions at an additional cost of 300 dollars, averaging one cent per Wiktionary word definition saved.
Naturally we’d prefer to record your definitions than those on Wiktionary, but as you know yours are copyrighted. We’re not claiming to have solved all the issues you face, but we have solved some. I challenge you to join us, or emulate our approach.
If Bitcoin can secure financial transactions, then blockchain can also secure our words.
There is simply too much at stake for you to continue in your current direction, and giving the Dictionary back to the people is a good deal better than locking it behind a wall.
Please subsidise the Dictionary using your billions of pounds of endowments and investments. Tear down the paywall and explore better technologies for the future of our Dictionary.
Best Wishes,
Dorian S. (Gig), Founder, Project Dara
projectdara.org
twitter: @dara_proj