One reason is that they are all based on an opt-in model. It’s therefore interesting that Harvard University decided that all scholarly publications by employees at the university must be made available online in an open access repository. The proposal uses the opt-out model instead, where all articles must be submitted to the repository and scholars who don’t wish their work to be openly available must apply for a waiver. I would love Norwegian universities to follow suit! NTNU has already taken a small step in the right direction, by deciding that all master’s and phd theses will follow the opt-out model.

In the future, open access might lower the barrier between academic publications and the “informal web”. Maybe blog comments on academic publications one day will be a common phenomena?

It may seem like banning internet sites is in the wind. Now Turkey do it too. To weeks ago, the creationist Adnan Oktar filed a court order where he claimed that a number of blogs on Wordpress were libellous to him and that the whole site should be banned. And he won!

An interesting point is that the order was carried out almost immediately, because there’s in practice only one broadband-firm in Turkey. This shows the need for several internet providers in a country – and for responsible internet providers. My internet provider here in Sweden, Bredband², clearly states that they won’t give away personal details or accept to bee cencored.We might take that for granted here, but why should we? Every internet provider should state this.