Opening Access to AIR's Research Publications

Many of you will have heard, by now, of the death of Aaron Swartz. He was, by all accounts, a technically brilliant man passionate about not just the technical but also the social aspects of the Internet. A firm believer in openness on the Internet, his prosecution was for an act of civil disobedience toward the American intellectual property regime: mass downloading of academic research from JSTOR. Swartz' death is thus leading many to demand that the journals through which we communicate abandon paywalls and adopt open-access policies.

Count me among them: Research in Higher Education, the research journal of the Association for Institutional Research, should adopt an open access model.