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Mr. Leonard ignores the core issue behind the availability of scientific information - it costs money. Scientific research has to take place somewhere, it has to be funded. Scientists, researchers and reviewers have to be paid. There are administrative costs, insurance costs, health care costs, electric bills. The editing, transmission, design and delivery systems, whether printed on paper then sent through the mail or delivered electronically, have to be designed and sustained.
The Open Access sites have been sustained by grants. None are self-funded; none are generating their own sustenance. This is no different than a tobacco company giving money to a favorite organization, ostensibly without strings attached, to publish anything without the tiresome issue of having the research and the researcher vetted, examined or judged until after the fact of publication, when the paper is already part of public knowledge.
Open Access and Wikipedia are based on the same premise that grants primacy to the values inherent in a free market economy. A free market is amoral. It does not regard creativity, originality, need, accuracy, inequality of access or even usefulness, only survival. Common knowledge is often superstition and a widely held belief does not mean what is believed is true. In the open access model a published paper, even a bad, ridiculous or dangerous one, is regarded as equal to any other.
Authors have to pay to submit to open access journals. Peer review is supposed to just happen. Both these tasks are work. I don't pay my boss for the privilege of working for him, why should a writer or reviewer pay for the privilege of working? Open Access doesn't remove the work, it just asks for free money to pay some of its own people but no expectation that it pay for what it markets as its own product. Open access journals merely offer a platform then charge scientists to stand on it.
No doubt there is a conflict between the for-profit industries that provide the resource material and the non-profit educational industry. (Make no mistake, like health care, education is an industry.) The issue is partly about the cost and expenses of education or information, but more about how we pay for it.
Publishers pay their writers and editors and the societies whose journals they publish. They negotiate to market and distribute the work they publish. More often than not, they do not own the copyright, but negotiate for shared royalties based on the number of copies read, sold or distributed; the better the distribution, the more the revenue to share. Like newspaper organizations, they provide the environment and support individuals or academic societies cannot provide for themselves. Being a chemist is a different job than creating and sustaining a chemistry journal.
Perhaps subscriptions or textbooks cost too much. Is the cost due to profiteering or a rise in publication costs? Those are legitimate questions, but the answer is not Open Access. The answer is setting a political high priority on funding education and educators, public libraries, electric and electronic infrastructure and demanding that access be equal, then it will be open.
