In Jorge Luis Borges’s short fiction Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the narrator discovers by accident the existence of a secret encyclopaedia. In this story more than in the others, Borges added many details that are actually true, in such a way that it is hard to tell the reality from the fiction. Needless to say, most would think that the secret encyclopaedia is pure fiction... and they would be wrong. Secret encyclopaedias do exist and they go by the name of “shadow libraries”.

Academic publishing

In the course of developing PubCron (a personalized academic literature watch), I learned that PubMed references more than 2,000 new articles daily. For the vast majority of those papers, the authors pay about $1,000 as publication fees. In the bio-medical field alone, this is a $2 million gift to the publishing industry. Every day.

Gift is not the proper term. This money goes to scientific editors and in such amount, it should be sufficient to sustain about 20,000 professional editors. An editor working full time would publish 3 papers per month... not an unreasonable estimate considering that only a fraction of the manuscripts are published. This means...