I love to browse ArsTechnica and Wired as a break from my work day. I find both of them to have smart, well written, and insightful articles that speak to those things that I am passionate about.

Today, ArsTechnica has a feature story about the history of Open Access publishing in academia. As a librarian, this is a subject that is near and dear to my profession as probably the biggest issues facing libraries (even bigger than Google, Wikipedia, and eBooks), especially academic libraries, is the crushing cost of journal subscriptions. Within academic circles, this problem is well known and some very smart people, spearheaded by scientists who need open access to find the latest research and results in their field but sometimes find the way blocked by pay walls, have been leading the charge for journals without access fees.

I hope to write a post about Open Access, Open Source, and Creative Commons soon, but for now, just check out the ArsTechnica story here.