Open Access Academic Publishing

The NYT writes,

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish -- on the Web, at least -- free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday's vote would apply only to Harvard's arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university's prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

The strangle-hold that the academic publishing industry has on academia astounds me: universitys give away their work for free in the form of published research, and then they are forced to buy it back at astronomical rates in the form of print journals and database subscriptions. While I suspect that some academics like that their research is ensconced within the ivory tower, restricted discourse available to only the elite, it also seems to me that it would be best if that discourse were freely available to the general public. I'm not suggesting that the peer review system be dismantled, quality control in academia is absolutely essential to for any discipline to advance its knowledge and processes, but why enforce what is now an arbitrary and harmful barrier to entry? The only reason to continue with the present system is to foster elitism and protect the profits of corporations such as ProQuest and Elsevier.

Thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.