Napster for academics My entry in a Chicago business plan competition was software that helped academics share their research with each other. Academic journals make obscene profits (libraries are very price insensitive) and I wanted to shift some of that surplus to consumers (the scientists -- who also happened to produce the content). The judges were not impressed by my idea, but it lives on as George Soros's Open Access Initiative.

The whining you hear in the article is the handful of academic journal publishers moaning about their profits (maybe) going down. But they shouldn't worry -- refereed journals bring prestige because they are hard to access, and thus are valuable to academics.