I don’t know a lot about the ins and outs of academic publishing, so let’s start by making that clear. More often than not, I’m likely to trip over government or thinktank reports than scholarly articles. I don’t have a home account for EBSCO access, or a university library account to access their scholarly journals that way, so in the absence of that type of access, I love the idea of Open Access. And when the University College of London announces they’ve hit their 1M download mark of e-texts through Open Access, that sounds outright awesome. The true power of the original university net, sharing and collaborating without restricted rights for the information. Releasing their findings into the wild.

But I do know that the world is not that clean. Academics compete for prestige journals, publishers hoard space and leverage control and $$ through access to those same journals, and while open access threatens to “disrupt” that industry, it is mostly a drop in the bucket.  » Read the rest