Summary and outlook

This chapter concludes that with digitization and the internet, open access to academic publishing could help to create a modern ‘Republic of Letters’, say a ‘Republic of Bits and Bytes’, supplying society with important scholarly information. This would require some collective action to ensure that high-quality scholarly information is generated based on the researcher’s curiosity and effectively disseminated to users at reasonable (search) cost. Any such system must take into account the specific interests and incentives of a range of different actors, including authors, academic libraries, learned societies, for-profit and not-for-profit publishers and individual readers of scholarly articles, but also governments, research sponsors and the tax-paying public.