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On the economy of academia

Two more Economist articles.

This one suggests that academic journals are likely to lock down their clients' sharing tendencies (including asking their clients' to remove published content from their own websites). One journal, Elsevier, has already started asking people to take stuff that belongs to their journal down. I appreciated this quote from Thomas Hickerson, chief librarian at the University of Calgary:
“Requesting such removals…seems at odds with the nature of an academic enterprise, in which the sharing of research information is an essential element.”
Another article discusses the skew of research itself; that it is mostly based on the US, where there is an abundance of data available. It's a sad situation for the world's poor, who ironically need the implementation of all the cool things that academia finds out:
"The world’s poorest countries are effectively ignored by the profession. From 1985 to 2005 Burundi was the subject of just four papers."
Two problems persist, and I have written about this before: Academia is not free for all, and its content is not about all. But, if academia is supposed to be a product of society and whose products are for society, then how did these problem arise?

Effectively, I would like Elimushare to deal with both these problems. The trick I think will be to make sure its design is akin to Tanzanian students. The web isn't always available to students... but is academia for students only, or does its implication touch the rest of the society as well?
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