The Royal Society believes open access to research results through electronic media would harm (read: profit through) publishing activities of professional societies. Sounds familiar? Yes, this precisely is the same storyline the masters of RIAA keep spinning. No dog is different in barking territorial imperative!

…it could lead to the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies, which put out about a third of all journals. “Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society,”

says the royal society. So be it. I am sure alchemists of eon might have cried foul when some started letting their closely guarded secrets and it is the birth of modern science, as we know. The scholarly societies had their runs in an era when information was scarce. They had a role to play in accumulating the information, verifying and classifying them and disseminating them. As information becomes ubiquitous the roles change. It has been a decade since the Condensed Matter Physics archives started and we know how incredibly useful and successful it has been. The current sensation in this domain is The Public Library of Science.

Well, good lords, it’s time to pack and go.