Scholarly Journals and the Flow of Information

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Scholarly Journals Premier Status Is Diluted by Web, Bernard Wysocki Jr. reports the latest episode in the increasingly contentious debate between professors, administrators, and academic publishers over subscription fees and electronic access to prestige print-only academic journals. According to Michael Eisen, a well-known computational biologist and a University of California Berkeley faculty member, high subscription fees for such journals are inhibiting scientific progress and giving a false impression to academics who think they have full access to up-to-themoment research. His solution: Eliminate subscription fees and barriers to universal accessibility associated with prestige print-only journals. To help move things in this direction, Eisen cofounded a nonprofit startup called the Public Library of Science, which produces its own scholarly journals, in competition with established publishers, and is distributed free of charge online