Slashdot Mirror
Free Global Virtual Scientific Library
Several readers wrote in with news of the momentum gathering behind free access to government-funded research. A petition "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe" garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organizations from around the world. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100 million towards support for open access journals and for the building of infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories able to store the millions of academic articles written each year. In the article Michael Geist discusses the open access movement and its critics.
Actually, for many 'researchers', the purpose of libraries and journals is to bury information, not to spread it. A significant minority of people in academia have to publish to get their degree or maintain their position or maintain their funding, and they publish stuff that is trivial, irrelevant, or outright bullshit. They do not want the average person to be able to say "My taxes were spent on THIS???" They will be some of the strongest opponents of open access.