"In the mean time China is rather successfully countering the growth of its population"

Right, you mean that large country that has been trampling over the freedom of its people for decades and carrying out a state sponsored, gender selective campaign of coerced abortion? Great example, really great.

Chesterton was a great observer and used great wit to comment on society The fault in the analogy is that the two options provided (give a raise or restrict spending options) are only a small subset of the potential scenarios owner goes out of business by paying more in salaries than the labor produces in profits employer forgoes 4pence raise, and instead provides employees with a healthy lunch every day owner fires employee and hires two children who will work for 1pence each employee leaves owner for a job that pays better etc. Chesterton correctly points out that it isnt ethical to deprive a person their freedom (by restricting how they can spend the salary they are paid), but the answer to the problem presented isnt as simple as inflating the salary of the employee. True freedom must encompass both parties in the work contract.

There have been a few mentions of PLoS and several pre-print servers But a transition from a major publishing conglomerate (Elsevier, Springer, Kluwer) doesnt require building your own capability from the ground up, or dropping the more formal review structure for a pre-print/forum type arrangement There are several very reasonable, non-profit publishing outlets available, the one that jumps to mind is HighWire Press. http://highwire.stanford.edu/ They provide the framework and hosting, you provide the typical editorial board and reviewers Several large societies now use them, including the American Society for Microbiology.

If you cant make your payments on a 300K mortgage with 130K income then you obviously have major issues with your budget or other financial constraints you arent revealing. Quick check of a standard mortgage calculator and it looks like if you were in a 15 year fixed at 5% (easily refinanced these days) you wouldnt be paying more than 2300/month. So you are looking at 37K/year and sure there are upkeep costs and property taxes... there also is a big fat deduction for interest you are paying. Maybe you were previously married and have to may alimony/child support etc. Maybe you have a parent in eldercare... I dont know. But crying that you cant make your mortgage when you are still pulling in 130K isnt going to garner a lot of sympathy when there are literally thousands of people who do the same on 75% of your household income

As challenging as Imperial measurements are, it could be so much worse. We could use Slashdot units of measurement like Libraries of Congress (LoCs), Volkswagon Beetles (VWBs) and StretchToTheMoonAndBacks (SttMaBs)

The costs of obtaining scholarly journals has been a major problem for over 2 decades, it seems to be getting more press in the last 5 years as the libraries have run out of simple fixes (consolidating purchases, canceling low use journals, etc) and the major publishers are now the only remaining places to cut back.

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/

it's all fun and games until you catch THE KRAKEN !!!

Koha is a great project (another great open project is Evergreen)... but last I checked it doesnt really do document management. Outside of the librarian/information professional communities there seems to be a lack of understanding about information categorization and classification. There are fairly large differences in how you handle the storage, metadata and retrieval options for something that could 'circulate' in a traditional library and a component piece (article/paper). Traditionally there have been specialized resources for source level objects (books/journals) and there were specialized resources for digging deeper and locating chapters/articles/papers/abstracts within source objects. I commonly see researchers checking a library catalog for a known article title, when the OPAC only includes journal title data Maybe this is something new with the blurring of publishing on the web? There has been a lot of work on federated searching as a a solution to this... but in most implementations my experience has been that patrons lose the ability to use the individual resources to fullest effect and get a results list that leads to further confusion. In any case, Koha would be great for setting up a lending library, and could be used as a framework for managing the metadata (title, author, year) with a link to a file... but in terms of actually having searchable text/OCR and additional tools it would be a poor choice (something like LibraryThing would be simpler if you werent worried about checkin/checkout, patron records, late fees etc)

I was sure this was going to examine voter participation among gamers given the proximity of the release of WotLK to the US elections in November...