Open Access to Content and Financial Innovation

Over the last twenty years the world has experienced significant growth in the supply of knowledge as a result of the advent of the Internet and there has been a drastic reduction in the cost of acquiring or constructing relevant information. This has meant that various industries, like banks, commerce and even the public management sector have undergone a reconfiguration process. Similarly, universities and the publishers of scientific periodicals need to reflect on their future. After all, who is prepared to pay for content that can be freely accessed? In the wake of the change in the technological paradigm that characterizes communication, and driven by financial crises, we find the topic of Financial Innovation (Lerner, 2006). But this topic was already on the agenda even before the Internet appeared on the scene (Miller, 1986). At the beginning of May 2013, when we started putting together the Journal of Financial Innovation (JoFI) an article entitled “Free-for-all”, which was published in the important British publication, The Economist, discussed the growth of open access scientific journals. At the time the British magazine stressed the practice adopted in the UK, which established open access journals as being the destination for research results. In essence, what is intended is to constitute a quality publication route without readers or authors being burdened with high costs, an area that is still responsible for large portions of the billionaire publishing market around the world.