I spent 5 minutes or so looking at this. So I may be wrong. But it looks like their primary concern happens to be government making publications available for free online download rather than through journals that cost money. It seems to be that this would be a step in the right direction. I think many people in academia realize that the journal/conference method of publication is broken -- for the following reasons: -- Turnaround time (esp for journals) is unreasonably long -- Authors usually dont know who their reviewers are. Comments are anonymous -- Authors dont have a chance to give a rebuttal. A rejection is final and binding

I think a digg/reddit style of weighted karma would work much better. Weighted = authors with greater influence in the community have greater say in whether or not a paper gets published. Comments can be non anonymous and authors have a chance at rebuttal which means that they have an opportunity to influence opinion and votes as the paper is being reviewed.

The downside of not having such a system in place is painfully obvious to anyone who has spent some time in academia I think. Even prestigious conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM have often been accused of running as cliques.

I don't quite get it. They cry censorship, but then want to continue keeping research behind the wall of payment.

All professors I've met would love to have more people read their papers. The way to do this is to make them open.

I understand the need for peer-review, but I don't see the need for it to be expensive.

A non-profit group could start peer-review.org. It would be a social network of researchers that rate the skills of other researchers. Ratings and reviews of papers submitted to the site would be scaled with something like a page-rank algorithm based on the collective reputation of the reviewers. The highest ranked papers would be presented on the front page of the topic area. Topic areas could be extremely customizable to precise niches.

It's interesting that the voting schemes of social news sites could be applied to the problem.

A final note, the following search works wonders to find gated papers: "[paper name]" filetype:pdf

this group is pure evil. it's been roundly whumped on the scienceblogs network (yeah, that's real scientists, not PR paid lackeys for the walled garden science press). PLoS is the future. R&D without access to the primary literature is impossible. we get scientists to do research who have to publish in these journals and then universities have to pay to subscribe. if you think getting people to send you the manuscripts (who also do the reviewing) that you then bind and sell back to the same people is a bit off, you're not alone.