The title is an homage to the soon-to-be-released movie based on the Canadian Scott Pilgrim comic book series, which you should read.
So Mark Leggott, University Librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island, is making some waves in the mainstream press. In the Toronto Star: Canadian librarian leads worldwide digital revolt for free knowledge. On the CBC: University to bypass expensive database. Earlier in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Hot Type: Canadian University Hopes to Lead Fight Against High Subscription Prices. An important clarification on that article from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network: Open Letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education (PDF) and in his own words: UPEI, Web of Science and Knowledge for All.
It's really nice to see so many of the commenters on these posts seeming to at least partially understand the issues and agree with the approach.
In a nutshell, Mark is fed up with constant price increases for research databases, and has dropped one of the biggies, Web of Science, from the list of databases to which his university subscribes. Instead, he and Amanda Stevens (I don't know her) have proposed the Knowledge for all Project, which audaciously proposes "to engage the international academic library community to collectively create a universal citation index to all of the world's past and current scholarly journal literature. The tool will be accessible to all via the web and will be called Knowledge for All."
Mark's actually got a positive track record with big shifts like this. In 2008 he dropped the commercial Sirsi Unicorn Integrated Library Service (ILS) like a hot potato in favour of open source alternative Evergreen.
It'll be interesting to see how it progresses. Off to quiz our licensing librarian on the issue…