Scholarly publishers and access to research

The Canadian law blog Slaw has an excellent article today discussing scholarly publishing. The author says, "(t)he current series of legal kerfuffles in scholarly publishing involves property and access rights in an industry that is, for all intents and purposes, moving toward universal open access..." but the publishers' "legal strategy is about reminding the academic community that such publishers own the better part of this body of knowledge and, as such, have a legal right to determine the financing of access to it now and into that uncertain future." He makes an interesting suggestion at the end of the article, saying that it may be time to reform the law, to create a new catgory of intellection property that is for scientific and academic research.