Caltech Announces Open Access Policy
<p><pre><code>  The decision of our faculty to make their papers freely
  accessible online will ensure that the global community of
  researchers, students, and casual followers of science and
  engineering will learn about our work at earlier stages, enabling
  them to put it to use for the benefit of society.
</code></pre>
I <i>love</i> how they mention "casual followers of science". To me this is a huge deal. I'm not a member of academia, but I really enjoy reading papers from a wide variety of fields (in the spirit of "learn everything about something and something about everything"). I never intend to stop, and I know lots of "laymen" who do the same.<p>The unavailability of papers, lack of centralized tools, and terrible search interfaces have been incredibly frustrating. I can't wait for a day when we get a centralized, non-profit, publish/subscribe consumer service for all the papers that ever get published by major research universities (with a good search tool). The value of such a service to the public and society would be <i>enormous</i>. As more and more people get educated and used to dealing with science, this could be as big a deal as wikipedia.<p>We're not quite there yet, but this is a huge step by CalTech in the right direction.