Hey Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig...

The rest of you may find this interesting, too.

The other day we had a symposium on the price of academic journals, which is past the crisis point in this country. Our main speaker was David Schulenberger, who is the provost of the University of Kansas. Some of his talk was taken from a paper on a new system of scholarship.

Basically, while the consumer price index has risen 57% over the last 15 years, the price of health care has risen 121%. The cost of scientific journals? 220%.

Schulenberger has some ideas on how to deal with this--though I cannot see a way out of this beyond massive organization of professors or sweeping anti-trust litigation against Elvesier and other publishers that see nothing wrong with charging the price of a luxury car for a stack of paper with writing on it. The University of Connecticut had their own forum on this as well. I am curious to see what they said about Creative Commons.