I’m excited to say that I’ve been invited to join the team at Kairos, an online peer-reviewed academic journal, as their Communications Editor. I am really excited for the opportunity. I admire and enjoy Kairos because it works to expand the definition of what academic work can be, publishing podcasts, visual art, interactive texts, and more. I also admire it because it is open access, and I think the need to open access to academic work is one of the most direct and important tasks we face as academics today.

When Aaron Swartz died, he was the target of a vicious and aggressive prosecution, owing to the fact that he had downloaded many articles from the academic journal archive JSTOR. This prosecution was ridiculous on many levels, but few more enraging than the fact that these articles were written for no direct monetary compensation by academics who felt they were contributing to the public good. The academic publishing cartel depends on the labor of professors and researchers who are paid by other institutions, very often public entities, and sucks millions and millions of dollars from our colleges and universities. Meanwhile, they systematically prevent access to the public. I have a very large network of academics that I am friends and acquaintances with. I bring up this subject constantly. In conversation with hundreds and hundreds of academics, I have never– never– met one that does not believe in the principle of open access to academic research.

The cost of hosting and developing the websites on which academic work can be provided to the public is not zero. But then, since colleges and universities already pay millions of dollars to for-profit entities for journal access, surely we can begin to withdraw from that hideously expensive edifice and devote funds to hosting publicly available academic research online. We need only make up our minds and create a coalition. There is no reason, in the 21st century, that we can’t make academic research universally accessible.

The work of a single journal, of course, makes little difference. But I believe that Kairos can be part of a broad movement towards open access academic publishing, so long as we as academics choose to value work that is published in freely accessible, online spaces. The academy faces many problems, some of which frequently seem intractable. But this problem is clearly, thoroughly solvable. We can move to a norm of universal free access to academic research, and someday, we will.