The World Wide Web was originally envisioned to allow for academics to freely exchange information. Way back in 1994 I got my first slip server account and downloaded a copy of Mosaic to "surf" the nascent World Wide Web. At that time almost all the content was from academia or the scientific community with the physics and astronomy crowd leading the way. The first pictures I ever saw on the web were of the of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 colliding with the planet Jupiter!
"Back in the day" before Google, Lycos etc.. was "The Mother of All BBS's" a simple index of web sites. I remember when there were only around 300 entries.
At that time my mentor (I'm a biologist) suggested that we do an online, peer-reviewed biological sciences journal and in 1995 we set up the World Wide Web Journal of Biology which still exists at http://epress.com/w3jbio
Alas, all the big scientific journals now charge a hefty fee for online content and that was a big dissapointment to me, especially considering I had to pull 20-50 volumes of bound journals from the stacks and photocopy any articles I needed for any literature search - an arduous and time consuming process and useless if the figure or illustration was in color or color coded (like a chart or graph).
It was always my belief that the Web would be THE tool for enhancing scientific communication and it is unfortunate that the situation now, 10 years later, is the same as it was then. Until the big publishing houses come on board (and they won't) don't hold your breath about the Online Virtual Library ever being useful or complete.
Oh sure you can read Shakespeare, etc. at the Gutenberg Project but it will only be material in the public domain which is already freely available. The publishers will resist this trend and may never allow current or archival material to be accessed for free. What burns me up about this is that our tax dollars paid for most of this research at state Universities, NIH, NSF and other granting organizations. But the big publishers are profiting from it. Take Science and Nature for example.
Just an early morning rant!
-michael
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/index.php?showtopic=10020&st=0&#