Talk : OpenAccess is changing what can be found :

Info liberation [Ref#2]


barriers to the spread of information are bad for capitalism The dissemination of knowledge is almost as crucial as the production of it for the creation of wealth, and knowledge (like people) can't reproduce in isolation.

$28B/year into medical research

ARL reports that median annual spending for journals at 101 of its big member libraries rose to nearly $6 million in 2005 from $1.5 million in 1986

PLoS covers its costs by charging authors from $1,250 to $2,750 per article (usually paid by their institutions and reduced or waived for authors who can't pay).

American institutions of higher education are knowledge machines of unprecedented fecundity, but much of the knowledge they produce is locked up in high-priced scholarly journals that most people can't easily get.

paying for research and

then paying again to buy it back

work of paid editors and of professor-volunteers who serve as peer reviewers of submissions, these publications act as gateways, at least theoretically upholding scholarly standards and separating the academic wheat from the chaff. And they play a key role in the way scholars achieve tenure and prestige.

(It's easy to scoff at the rise of Madonna studies and other risible academic excrescences, but...) a flood of truly important research pours from campuses every day. The infrastructure that produces this work is surely one of America's greatest competitive advantages.

open access might help to moderate some of the worst forms of academic hokum, if only by holding them up to the light of day -- and perhaps by making taxpayers, parents and college donors more careful about where they send their money.

Entering the realm of delirium for a moment, one can even imagine public exposure encouraging professors in the humanities and social sciences to write in plain English.


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Journal Machine Learning Research (JMLR)


Created by rik@cogsci.ucsd.edu 4/1/08