What makes an author?

Let the great war of publishing begin!

The sides in this fight are fairly predictable.  On the one side, we have professional writers manning the walls of the gatekeepers.  On the other side, we have the rampaging barbarian hordes who wish to access the treasures within.

This is fairly predictable, and parallels any of a number of other technological disruptions from the past.  It's also going to be similarly experienced when 3D printing comes of age and we hear the same arguments around manufacturing and construction.

Kozlowski specifically mentions science, which is a bad analogy.  The practice of "professional" science is a fairly new thing and historically you have numerous stories of amateurs who upended the prevailing theories or made discoveries.  These people weren't credentialed or accepted by others, and often faced massive amounts of resistance, yet they were ultimately correct.  They weren't any less correct because they didn't have the support of "professionals."

The most famous, perhaps, is Copernicus, who went against the professionals of his day with a heliocentric universe.  But you have plenty of others, including some recent Nobel-prize winners in economics (Daniel Kahneman in '02 and Robert Aumann in '05) who weren't economists.  The whole history of Renaissance polymaths is all about people doing things outside their field.

Always throughout history the credentialed and licensed have sought to prevent others from practicing in their field.  Sometimes, society has permitted this because bitter experience has proven that we must (medicine, military, foreign affairs). 

Otherwise the prevailing social impulse should always lean towards the most inclusive set of conditions possible.  It is true that much of what gets produced will be dreck in this model; however, we must acknowledge that professionals can create dreck, too.

To borrow from economics, we should allow the market (whether it be readers or clothes shoppers or car buyers) to decide what, ultimately, is worth paying for and what has no value, and then the market will align itself accordingly.