There has been a movement for some time to make available high quality educational materials free to anyone who is interested and one common criticism is that without the high quality peer review of that knowledge, it can't be trusted. Publishers of journals are very keen to support this view because their business is all about copyright of research so it can be sold back to those who need access to it, in many cases other researchers, through their libraries. It's a very lucrative business.
But there's an alternative that is being explored increasingly using the web as the means of dissemination. By posting on the web, the lengthy editorial process is shortened, and providing those reviewing the material are trusted, the final quality could even be improved. Time-sensitive material, such as in technical or scientific areas, get wide dissemination quickly and because of the ease of access to the web, it reaches a wide audience even quicker than a library subscription.
Some examples of this work are at:
Directory of Open Access Journals.
The model of open source has also been taken up in education more generally using the wiki model and providing software:
Open Source Educational Foundation.
The TED conference (Technology, Education, Design) makes available a load of very high quality talks at:
Ted Talks.
There's also a whole load of courses now available for download from some universities who are breaking out of the publishing mold:
MIT Open Courseware.
As the web matures and learning gets out of academia, we may well see a significant change in the assumptions behind copyright and the restricted access to learning. That challenges the idea of ownership of knowledge and the right to profit from it. It'll be interesting to see how academia and the publishing industry responds.
