I’m getting the first email from librarians. Apparently there’s an “open access” movement which has been agitating about this stuff for a while. I kind of assumed there would be, given the logic of the internet age. A few have objected about the costs. “Who’s going to pay for free access?”

Look: I don’t know. But someone’s paying for free access to libraries. The science journals cost a fortune to subscribe to. Considering the amount of Pharma money out there, and the public interest in furthering science you’d think someone would come up with a way to lower the costs there. I don’t particularly care about the details. But I think it’s a straw man to say the costs are what keeps me from paying for a single-user subscription! Few business models rely on denying the customer the opportunity to pay for the product.

As for giving this stuff out for free, libraries already do that. They just make it hard, by requiring the interested party to physically go to the library. I’ve been told that JStor itself is for profit, but the economics of the academic-industrial complex make it difficult for it to spread the wealth. Fine. But where are the foundations? Where is the National Endowment for Humanities? They could help pay for public access. I’ll take a few fewer exhibitions on lesbian literature in ante-bellum Kentucky in exchange for free access to the accumulated wisdom of Western scholarship.

What the opponents of putting this stuff out for free seem to be saying is that they don’t want it to be easy to get. Maybe that’s because it will make librarians less important, maybe that’s because it will result in fewer posh conferences for academic journal editors. I don’t care. I just think it’s hypocritical for people who claim to answer to a higher calling than mere profit to defend the principle of denying the public this stuff. As for the practical objections, someone else can sort them out.