Informing public access to peer reviewed scholarly publications and data resulting from publicly funded research

"Controlling access to a resource is a common way to generate profit; because gold is inherently hard to access, it is a good basis for an economy. Similarly, all sorts of materials that are found to have desirable properties become valuable, usually as a function of their desirability in relation to accessibility. Digital artefacts, however, are very easy to copy and distribute. In cases where an industry has grown up around the distribution of a product that has become digitally easy to copy and share, efforts have been made to artificially maintain that difficulty via the application of the concept of digital piracy....Encumbering digital artefacts with artificial accessibility restrictions does not make them hard to find, copy, or distribute – it just makes them needlessly complicated...."