Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

Here's a good proposal:
It is high time that we placed all the content of peer reviewed, academic journals online, for free, and without any employment-based firewalls. It is a simple, cheap way to make a big leap forward for our culture, our democracy and our educational system. Information like this should not be restricted to a small percentage of society for the enrichment of the academic publishing world. There really is no way to justify denying 95% of the country access to our best, peer-reviewed academic research.Academia isn't a priesthood. If the goal of your institution is to further intellectual progress and learning, there's no reason you should submit your work to a publisher who charges for reprints rather than put it on the web for free. If your livelihood depends on your position as a gatekeeper to a hoard of information, you better figure out how to add some value.

This is analogous to what the newspapers are going through and comes down to the same issue: one of the problems that publishers were created to solve (getting information from an author and making it available to an audience) just isn't a problem anymore. We still need academic, peer-reviewed studies and papers, just like we still need journalism. But that doesn't mean we need over-priced journals locked away in ivory towers/closed databases.