(2002-02-15) e

George Soros is giving money to a group trying to get scientific research published online for free (for the benefit of poor countries). The core mechanism of difficulty is that (a) tenure and other university faculty rewards are given on the basis of publication to "respected" journals, (b) the respected journals won't publish something which has already appeared elsewhere, nor will they let someone publish later to another outlet, since both of those protect their subscription prices. So the problem, as with SATs, is the over-reliance of universities with semi-arbitrary systems of Reputation Management.