"“Knowledge should not be accessible only to those who can pay,” said Robert May, chair of UC’s faculty Academic Senate. “The quest for full open access is essential if we are to truly uphold the mission of this university.” The Academic Senate issued a statement today endorsing UC’s position."

An excellent decision by UC! This decision will likely cause some pain in the short-term but in the long-term those who want or need access to knowledge will be much better off.

Access to knowledge via expensive journals has long been a problem for many primarily for reasons of expense and copyright. Whilst these barriers are obvious, some are less so. In the past access to knowledge via these journals worked to a degree as academic and professional institutions and university libraries usually provided access to them but only for those associated with said organizations—that effectively left many others locked out. Whilst not completely satisfactory, the distribution system worked, albeit very inefficiently. That meant that for some knowledge was readily accessible but for others it only slowly trickled out, effectively society as a whole had access but it was both sporadic and punctuated.

However, in recent years several factors changed to make that already-inefficient distribution system untenable. First, there has been an explosion of new knowledge that has pushed the old distribution to straining point, then the development of the internet changed the paradigm completely: it both pushed the problems of copyright to the fore and showed up how slow and inefficient the old system was, and finally the middlemen opportunists had a field day—publishers like Elsevier effectively became knowledge monopolies and exploited the system to the point of breaking.

There is no doubt the knowledge distribution system has become completely broken, one only has to look at the phenomenal success of Alexandra Elbakyan's pirate website Sci-Hub to come to that conclusion. In turn, staid universities and academics, etc.—those who publishers like Elsevier had already held to ransom for some considerable time—realized that Sci-Hub's success provided the opportunity to break free of the publishers' yokes.

When it comes to the distribution of knowledge, it is difficult for one to over exaggerate how truly limiting and restrictive the publishers' copyright system is. Whilst copyright has always been a limiting factor in this area, it is especially so in this digital information age. Why it is so is a huge subject that I cannot address in detail here, suffice to say it covers a vast expanse: from monopolies on information, the high cost of textbooks to restrictions on the electronic concatenation of information and research databases through to AI processing of existing knowledge. In this area the misuse of copyright is immense.

There is no doubt in my mind that the distribution system needs to be opened up and that open access is the route foreword. We have to applaud the University of California's decision to terminate subscriptions with Elsevier in its push for open access to publicly funded research. The aim for all published research ought to be for it to be fully open to everyone.