In Not-so-Modest Proposals: What do we want our system of scholarly communication to look like in 2010?, John Unsworth explains that

In a better world, high-quality, peer-reviewed information would be freely available soon after its creation; it would be digital by default, but optionally available in print for a price; it would be easy to find, and it would be available long after its creation, at a stable address, in a stable form.

While the basic open access message which underlies this text is hardly new, the concern over maintaining stable locations for online texts is a topic which deserves more discussion. The suggestion that libraries maintain digital object repositories to reduce link rot of scholarly resources seems a good one, but one that only works within a open access world where libraries have the right to copy and store such texts. And more importantly, if universities do collect, and preserve, and provide open access to the content they produce, then the entire balance of power shifts away from commercial publishing and toward university presses and university libraries.

Link courtesy of OLDaily.