Open access journals can be compared to musicians who release their music on myspace or on the Pirate Bay. Rather than being locked into copyrights owned by large corporations, open access content flows free. This seems to be a growing movement in academia that aims to circumvent the publishing houses that have made academic publishing big business.
The question is when ISI ranking will be replaced with an open alternative, perhaps taking into account several types of data like the 0xdb for movies. Currently, according to Wikipedia, there are a billion English speakers on a “basic” level, hopefully such an index might allow “international” to be broadened to include the 400 million native Spanish speakers (600 million if you count the Portuguese speakers who could probably decipher Spanish), or the billion+ that can read Chinese characters. Why English should be the only lingua franca of academia is a good question.
See: Open access in STS or On Academic Productivity
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