It never hurts for Kansas University to find itself in the same group with Harvard, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That’s what KU accomplished last week with the introduction of a new system that will provide online access to scholarly articles and papers by KU researchers. Through the online system, other researchers, as well as the general public, can read thousands of KU research articles at no charge.

Although KU envisions most of the research also being published in scholarly journals, the cost of those journals is a limiting factor for many universities. Having the KU material available online for free will provide a far broader audience for the work.

Although other universities probably will follow suit, KU is the first public university to give this kind of free online access. The innovative step puts KU in some pretty elite company and is a nice feather in the Jayhawks’ cap.