Steal This Research Paper! – Mother Jones

"Eisen and his fellow PLOS cofounders, the Nobel laureate Harold Varmus and Stanford University professor Patrick Brown, saw the subscription-based journals as anachronisms, obstacles to scientific advancement in an era of big data. Papers take ages to get into print, and when they appear online they are hidden behind paywalls, hard to browse, and impervious to text- and data-mining techniques that could lead to new discoveries. Like your cable TV provider, the biggest publishers also bundle their products, forcing strapped university libraries to buy dozens of journals they don’t want to get the ones they need. Last year, Elsevier reported pretax profits of almost $1.3 billion, a margin of more than 30 percent.

If Aaron Swartz is the open-access movement’s first martyr, Michael Eisen is its inside agitator...."