Yesterday was Natasha's birthday. One of the gifts I wanted to give her was a subscription to the University of Pennsylvania library (we live right next to UPenn), so that she would have remote access to all the academic databases (the free library of Philadelphia provides remote access to some, but not all, of those databases). Natasha has long lamented her lack of access to scientific journals now that she is no longer in school. Such journals are key to both her work as a sustainable food writer. Also, it is relevant to her personal enrichment, due to her interests, and background, in biological science. Further, as a long-time graduate student myself, I remember just how useful it was to have remote access to such a treasure trove of academic work. Even now, there have been numerous times during my writing where I run up against firewalls on JSTOR. So, I figured it was time to get us access to all of this great information.
The problem is, as a I discovered, even if you are willing to spend $400 a year for access to the library as an individual, or $800 as part of a corporate account, access to many of the academic databases is still restricted. Unless you have a job with the university, or are enrolled as a student, many of the databases with the best available research are nearly impossible to access. Right now, the only way it seems that we can ever have access to many academic journals is for someone with access to illegally let us borrow their username and password. Nice.
Making all peer reviewed, academic journals free to the entire world online should be a cheap, simple, no-brainer policy for the federal government to improve society. How much would it cost the federal government to publish these journals online and for free? $10 million? $50 million? Probably about that much. But even if it is one billion dollars, are we seriously denying 95% of the country access to our best academic research because we are unwilling to shell out the necessary 1 / 3000th of the federal budget? Given that we constantly worry about our educational competitiveness as a country, there is simply no justification for allowing the academic publishing world to restrict access to our best research to such a small sliver of society. It is enough to remind someone of the local monopolies medieval European monasteries had over books.
The only people who make money off of these databases are the academic publishes themselves. The people who write and review the articles in these journals do it for free (well, for tenure, but still technically for free). The only exchange of money is when the libraries pay the publishers for the information. As such, these publishers are the ones restricting this remarkable cache of information for being available to anyone with the curiosity to learn. This is ridiculous. How can we say that we are serious about making America the country with the most per capita higher education in the world, as President Obama has recently set as a goal, if we continue to allow academic publishers to restrict our best academic research to a small sliver of our society?
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.
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