Here are some organizations that have been working to provide alternatives to authors and libraries, the rapid success of PLOS: Biology has certainly demonstrated that the traditional publishing models can be changed
SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
Group affiliated with the American Research Libraries organization
http://www.arl.org/sparc/
Highwire Press
A major non-profit publishing initiative linked to Stanford University
http://highwire.stanford.edu/
Create Change
Organization working to inform authors/researchers about their options in publishing
http://www.createchange.org/
Linux.com has a brief overview of FoxTorrent, a BitTorrent extension for Mozilla Firefox. The review outlines the extension's basic operation and takes a look at some of its more unique features, such as the ability to stream media files as they download.
BitTorrent clients are all over the place these days. One of the newcomers, FoxTorrent, is a fully functional cross-platform Firefox BitTorrent client created by Red Swoosh, a company that is now part of Akamai. What FoxTorrent lacks in features it makes up for in simplicity.
As of this writing the current release is 1.03 (version 1.0 was released on April 26). This version fixes an issue that caused the extension not to work on Linux and OS X; I ran into this issue under Gentoo (Firefox 1.5), but everything worked fine with Ubuntu 7.04 (Firefox 2.0).
FoxTorrent works like any BitTorrent client. When it finds a torrent it starts downloading the files and displays a screen to show the user what is going on.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"