Academic Work Should Be Distributed For Free | ThinkProgress

"Tim Lee has an item on the Aaron Swartz arrest that strikes me as a bit wrongheadedly concern trolly, fretting that “the more lasting cost of Aaron’s actions will likely be to the reputation of the open access movement.” This I doubt. Most likely, the lasting benefit of his actions will be to elevate the salience of the underlying issue on which Lee, Swartz, and I are all in agreement. And here’s the issue. Right now in academic publishing, what you have is basically a lot of donor- and government-financed nonprofit organizations taking outputs with near-zero distribution costs (electronic journal archives) and selling them to each other. For any one institution, this kind of makes sense. A publisher doesn’t want to give up his fees, which are valuable in meeting the costs of producing scholarship. But on net, it’s a mix of pointless and pernicious...."