There are many problems plaguing our university libraries, which many people do not konw about. One of them, as Robert Darnton explains in this New York Review of Books article, is the astronomical subscription costs to academic journals, which cost thousands of dollars.
Darnton ends his article with the hope that academic sorts of information from the US will one day be freely available to all, just as national libraries around the world are putting their collections online for all to access - these include the national libraries of the Netherlands, France, Norway, Finland, Japan and Australia. Darnton's call to change the commercialised control of information to an open and free system is heady and wonderful, and makes me hope along with him that we can 'Open the way to a general transformation of the landscape in what we now call the information society.' He states that we need a new ecology of information, 'One based on the public good instead of private gain.' And considering the billions of dollars in profits gained by publishers of periodicals, who often don't even bother to pay the academics who put in much hard reviewing and editing work, the public good has long enough suffered for the interest of shareholders!
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