The move towards free, crowdsourced academic journals continues. A Palo Alto-based team launched Cureus [3], a new online medical journal, this week. Cureus offers physicians an opportunity to publish papers online for a mass audience while retaining copyrights, unlike traditional journals. Creator John Adler, a Stanford neurosurgeon, told [4] the San Francisco Chronicle's Victoria Colliver that "we're trying to take the huge revolution in communication and blend it with the medical world [...] Medical journals are still stuck in this 200-year-old paradigm."

Most medical journals are locked behind paywalls online; the Internet's largest free database of medical journal articles, PubMed Central [5], has large content gaps. A somewhat similar project at Cornell University to offer free access to physics, mathematics, and computer science papers, arXiv [6], has become an academic staple in recent years. Earlier in 2012, Harvard University openly criticized [7] the high cost of medical journals.

[Image: Flickr user 401(K) 2012 [8]]