Last Thursday (February 15, 2007) was declared National Day of Action for Open Access. To help raise awareness of the movement for open access in scholarly publications at MIT, I got together with a number of other MIT students and placed price tags — we called them overprice tags — onto the 100 journals that MIT subscribes to at a cost of more than $5,000 USD per annum.
The project, inspired by a similar project called Seeing Red carried out by a Brown librarian a few years back, was a huge success. You can find information about the project, motivation and experience, see pictures, and find out how you might run a similar event at your institution on the Overprice Tags homepage.
This is totally awesome and I am going to find out if we can do it here at UCSD too.
Nice idea. Last year Lawrence Liang and Achal Prabhala spoke about the shortage of textbooks, and their astronomical price relative to income, in South Africa. Their suggestion, if I recall correctly, was that it underlined the urgent need for more piracy. Just a thought ;)