Michael Eisen, who helped found the Public Library of Science, traced the development of "Open academic publishing," including the skyrocketing costs of journals. If you're not familiar with open access, check out Peter Suber's "Open Access Overview."
The photo above shows a slide from Eisen's presentation that illustrates how print journals basically make money from publicly-funded scientific research by selling limited access to the research back to the public through libraries and individual subscriptions.
[Aside: I don't know to what extent the research published in Philippine Journal of Science (PJS) are funded by the Philippine government, but it's interesting that the Science and Technology Information Institute, publisher of PJS, is selling subscriptions to the journal, even though one of its mandates is "To disseminate science and technology information."]
Jenny Preece, dean of the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, discussed "Community, Social Interaction and Wikipedia." The most striking thing for me was that the dean of what is essentially a library school is presenting at Wikimania. And no, she did not say that Wikipedia is inaccurate or that "such an encyclopedia has no place in an academic information landscape."
Category: Wikimania
Wikimania 2006: Open Access and Online Communities
