Over the weekend, Aaron Swartz, the computer programming
wonderkind, committed suicide. My twitterfeed, which is a combination of
academics, writers and technology experts, grieved at this loss. In this
Internet age, you can feel close with an individual that you only know from
their online writing and articles written about him.  His death at 26 is a terrible loss.

Swartz captured my attention, after he broke into the
mainframe at MIT and downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR
database. He believed that academic research was wrongly held behind paywalls
and that this information should be freely accessable to the public.

It is very difficult, if not completely impossible, for the
public to read academic research. Accessing this research requires a long
distance ride to a university library (good luck getting into the library
without an university ID card) or a substantial fee. The general public, writers,
and other professionals cannot make use of this research. This is especially galling,
because much of this research is subsidized by the public at state universities
or through federal grants.

Currently, universities support the production of research
and its final publication, especially in the social sciences and the
humanities.  They provide grants and
course release time that enable faculty to conduct research. They house the
actual journals. Faculty sift through the articles and review the best content.
The heavy lifting behind academic research happens on the college campus.
Instead of creating profit, they create reputation.

Publishing companies take the finished product, typeset the
manuscript, produce a hard copy of the journal, distribute it to subscribers
for a fee, and then sell the content to a database company, like JSTOR. The database
company digitizes the article and sells the product to the universities
libraries. In the end, the universities, which created the content, must pay
huge sums to buy back their product.

By removing the two middlemen – the academic publishers and
the database companies — universities could save money, and academic research
could be freely available to all.

Instead of sending the finished academic journals to the
publishing companies, the journal editors should simply upload the articles to
a university website. The hard work of producing the content and the peer
review process has already been done. Few people actually read the hard copy of
journal, so there is very little need to produce a dead tree version of the
journal, collect subscriptions, and distribute it.

There is no need to disturb the peer review process, the
age-old system for quality control. Because the publishing companies own the
names of the journals, it might be necessary to create new journal names. But
with a strong editorial board and quality submissions, the new journals would
quickly replicate the status of the old journals.

With all the information online, there is no need to sell
the information to a database company to digitize the material. In the age of
Google Scholar, the search features of these library databases are irrelevant. I
can simply plug my key terms into any browser at my home computer and find all
the relevant articles.

There would be no cost to the university, because the
universities already produce this information for free. Universities and
individual professors currently receive no royalties for their work, so they
wouldn’t lose out by this system. Universities already have websites, where the
journals could post their content. Universities would not have to pay
substantial fees to pay back their own content.

By retaining the same peer review process, the quality of
the research would remain high, and faculty would not fear a loss to their
credibility. Most faculty would be overjoyed to find a larger audience for
their work. By eliminating the unnecessary hard copy version of academic
journals, universities would save money, a saving that would benefit the
students. Most importantly, all academic research would be available to the
public for free.