You know, if you manage to avoid spam, porn, and piracy, there are lots of ways to communicate with intelligent people and educate yourself on the internet.
The classic example, of course, would be academics. Improving communication amongst academics was one of the first purposes of the internet. Ironically most of the journals are locked up behind a copyright wall–journal publication being a business, and the rights of the authors generally signed away in exchange for the prestige of publication.
Publishing academic journals and books is a large part of an international industry. The shares of the major publishing companies are listed on national stock exchanges and management policies must satisfy the dividend expectations of international shareholders. Although some specialist academic publishers used to take a less commercial view of their business, the industry has been consolidating and, as smaller units are absorbed into the larger, standardised accounting and profit-oriented policies have dominated the industry. Critics have claimed that these policies now constrain more altruistic leanings of academic publishing.
From the Wikipedia entry on “Academic Publishing”.
However, many people realize how ridiculous this is, and have been advocating a more open system that isn’t beholden to the profit motive. And over the last few years they’ve had a lot of success.
Which is a long way of leading up to a link to the Directory of Open Access Journals.
This is an online resource the provides access to thousands of journals that support the rights of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles”. This is what the academy is supposed to be about.
At the time I am posting this there are 118178 articles in the journals indexed by the directory.
I don’t know how useful this would actually be for a targeted search for specific things, but to a dilettante like myself it’s heaven. While I should have been working today I was instead reading about:
- “Gnosis in Cyberspace? Body, Mind and Progress in Posthumanism” at the “Journal of Evolution and Technology“
- “Fast Query over Encrypted Character Data in Database“
This looks like a big security hole to me, by the way. at “Communications in Information and Systems“ - “The Exotic Other Scripted: Identity and Metamorphosis in David Mack’s Kabuki” at “ImageText“–a journal of “interdisciplinary comics studies”.
A little bit more article-level search metadata and this directory will be an order of magnitude more useful, and it looks like it’s coming. In the meantime it’s sure a geat place to browse.
