We hear the phrase "it's all on the Internet" more and more frequently, but it is not true for everyone. In the western world most of the information that scholars access for research is restricted to subscribers, with subscriptions only affordable by wealthy institutions. Moreover, access to the Internet is not necessarily easy - in several countries there is extremely limited bandwidth combined with a power supply that may be highly irregular. Open access has begun to address the first of these problems. In particle physics, for example, use of the preprint service arXiv.org means that there is basically always one version of any paper written in the last 15 years available to anyone with access to the Internet.
展开▼
