Anyone who has tried to read a scientific journal knows how complicated getting access to them is. If you don't live in the US or Europe, you have to working at a pretty wealthy organization to be able to access the latest research. It is mostly because of the established publishing clique that the inefficient practice still abounds. I would love to see the day that all scientific articles are published to be freely accessible by all citizens of the world. Science advances not by restricting information but by making it available to everyone. Open systems would also allow automated tools for information harvesting (did I make that term up?).
The physics and math people had understood this long back. So they set up http://arxiv.org . arXiv is a great resource with all the latest research available for free and on time. But it has the drawback that the articles haven't been refereed. Now there is a new open reviewing system -- Naboj. Naboj allows anyone to review the papers on arXiv. It will be interesting to see how well this process works. I hope someday every technical publication will be similarly available.
