I have to correct you on this. LCLS is the _only_ xray FEL in the world. At the end of the decade there will be 3. FLASH, the test facility for the XFEL can produce soft xrays. Granted it is not a true laser driven by stimulated emission of atoms but you can't have an x-ray laser because no optics have the necessary efficiency at these wavelengths. But for all intensive purposes it is a laser with coherent, tightly collimated light.

I'm not so sure about the "informations needs to be free" stuff when it comes to peer reviewed science. Elsevier does run a racket, especially when it comes to the archive articles, if your university library doesn't purchase the extended subscription it can be $30 per article.

But as a member of the American Physical Society http://www.aps.org/ I have access to pdf's of Einsteins original articles just for the cost of my membership, every article published in the Physical Review series is available.

APS publishes many phonebooks (about 1/10000000 LOC) worth of articles a month, this has got to be expensive. Furthermore maintaining and adminstering a network of peers to review articles is costly as well. Most of the articles deal with small minutia of physics that maybe dozens of people on earth would completely appreciate.

I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science. Something has to set it off from blogs and wikpedia's, furthermore if every crackpot had access to every conversation in physics my inbox would overflow with "Quantum Mechanics is Wrong! Ny New Theory of Nature" trash.

-- Brandon