The Dangerous "Research Works Act"

&#62; The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up.<p>While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing Group, the University of California system organized a (moderately effective) boycott, where scientists would not submit papers to any NPG journal [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/65823/" rel="nofollow">http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/6582...</a>

Though the gov't might want research to be distributed, the underlying problem here has more to do with the scientists themselves than anything else. We've had ArXiV around for a long time and <i>yet</i> I ask who's adopted it other than mathematicians and (many, but not all) physicists? Why hasn't it been adopted by NIH-funded life scientists?<p>The fact that years ago, life scientists easily could have adopted an ArXiV-like model for publishing, and <i>chose</i> not to, is quite telling. It suggests a far deeper problem with incentives in (general) academic culture to publish and that article availability is not going to affect that at all. As someone who spent &#62;6 years Ph.D./PostDoc (bioinformatics, stats and CS), I can say that the vast majority of researchers have no genuine incentive to take action. Protesting against Elsevier online in the comfort of your office is one thing, but having to publish X&#62;10 papers/yr to get tenure/brownie points within your department is another.

What about the page charge? Some of these journals charge the author (or her institution) by the page for papers they accept. They get ya coming and going. Nice racket. Check it out.<p><a href="http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/252/~/tps-page-charges" rel="nofollow">http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/252/~/tp...</a>

Does anyone have a good form letter for telling your representative that you're prepared to start walking around the voting district stopping people on the street and explaining that Carolyn Maloney is trying to restrict access to publicly funded research?<p>Carolyn Maloney is my Congresswoman and I don't give a shit that the alternative is a conservative, this is ridiculous.

"The way the research process works is like this:<p>1.) An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant. 2.) The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal. 3.) The journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.<p>The journal publishers believe that the public funding of research stops at step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the world."<p>Why don't the researchers just format the papers themselves and publish their work independently online? It seems like a trivial amount of work compared to the actual research that they are doing. I understand that many people believe that they shouldn't have to do this, but after reading the article I see nothing stopping them from distributing their work to the public.

This article is already a little bit out of date: It strikes me as unusual to describe 6,094 as "over 5,500" :)

"In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait 12 months to get the research for free."<p>So? That would be a sign that the value the journal adds by selecting what get's published is apparently not worth the price they are charging. In fact, why wait 12 months? If that leads to journals going out of business, there work wasn't worth the money. Of course there will be a need to organzie journal access, but I am sure that will be figured out super fast and the result will be cheaper and better, than what the Journals are doing right now. After all it's a problem we are solving on the Internet all the time.

I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall guys. Something much more important is going on.