When Orville Wright flew his airplane over a small stretch of rolling grassland in 1903, the managing editor of Scientific American predicted that thousands of planes would soon fly over every city, delivering patrons to theaters. On the eve of the First World War, two famous British aviators argued that planes would prevent wars in the future (because they brought people together). Scientists, engineers, and futurists have always conjectured the consequences of technology. In the case of planes, the experts were right in recognizing that they would profoundly affect our lives in the coming century... but they were certainly wrong in foretelling what that effect would be. Once again the experts are predicting the future. The digerati tell us that the Internet has changed everything, that technology will revolutionize the way we do business, and that nothing will again be the same. Maybe. But the experts provide few facts to back their predictions, and they preach a digital future as an act of faith rather than a reasoned conclusion. It's hard to tell hype from reality when someone promotes technology with religious zeal. What about scholarly publishing? Here, a special group of experts is predicting (and promoting) the future. The experts foretell the imminent collapse of scholarly journals and some advocate revolutionary replacements - refereed postings, e-prints, and overlays. In many countries, government agencies have embraced these predictions, providing support for alternatives - PubMed Central, the Public Library of Science, the arXiv. And experts offer miraculous solutions to previously intractable problems, describing a revolution in scholarly publishing that will provide universal free access to scholarship... at no cost to anyone. The "free" alternatives seem to be enticing solutions to our present, very real problems.
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