Less sinister obstacles to the free flow of information are no less aggravating. Vendors who charge outrageous fees for information probably won't long survive on the Internet except as a public irritant . We need to emphasize to our colleagues who operate computer networks to not turn off the computers at night. We also need to ask why countries such as Japan have so few libraries connected to the Internet. A third way in which university libraries can support the international research community is by convincing scholars and researchers to publish their findings on the Internet with minimal copyright restriction.
Researchers get little reward for publishing in print journals.
A few offprints of an article are hardly adequate compensation in view of what is charged for many journal subscriptions. We need to be sensitive to the issues of tenure and prestige when it comes to publishing, and we can be so by encouraging the academic structure to recognize Net publishing as legitimate and by encouraging the growth of refereed electronic journals. Intellectual property rights can take many forms. The reward is in recognition. Commercialism on the Internet is a touchy subject and quite different from that found in other media.