Wave of the present?

From Paul Axelrod of York University, co-editor of Historical Studies in Education, comes the following announcement:

Historical Studies in Education, Canada’s only peer reviewed, bilingual, history
of education journal, is now a fully on-line, open-access periodical. Accessible
at no cost world wide, the journal is poised to broaden its circulation of
original articles and reviews in the history of schooling, childhood,
post-secondary education, and related subjects.

They also provide TOCs (Tables of Contents for the uninitiated) monthly to your inbox. So you can scan for the articles you want and print them if you prefer to read from paper (and seriously, who doesn't?) and skip the ones you don't fancy. All for free. How cool is that? The info on Open Journal Systems, the flux capacitor of this magic, is available here.

OJS was originated, developed and distributed (free, though they ask for donations) by the Public Knowledge Project through through a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Simon Fraser University Library, the School of Education at Stanford University, and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University. PKU is the brainchild of the visionary Canadian educator John Willinsky, then of the Faculty of Education at UBC and now of Stanford University, who founded the project way back in 1998.

Now at this point in the post, you might be expecting me to say something like--this is no longer the wave of the future, it's the wave of the present, and why the heck doesn't every journal grab a surfboard, blah, blah, blah.

But can it be that simple? I am on the editorial board of a scholarly periodical (The Canadian Journal of Law and Society, a great journal, it goes without saying.) We are meeting in a couple of weeks and I will raise this question (as gingerly as I can, as befits a newbie board member.) If there are reasons why we are not jumping on board, I'll try to share them in a future post.