Letters to the Editor
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Stodgy old and out of touch
Whereas I think you have every right to denigrate anyone who puts forth that oxy moronic statement, most of these scientific journals are for profit. My understanding is that they most of their money from standard revenue streams such as subscriptions and advertising. Once you remove these sources of money by providing the content free from government sources, how will they make money?
The problem is that most scientific journals are stodgy, old, and out of touch.
Well, this is actually not too big of a problem if you change your thinking a bit. As would be expected, computer science (the area I am quite familiar with), with its strong ties to open source, is way ahead of the other sciences here. Most of the big journals do offer their content for free (or at least, they leave the copyright with the authors who can then post it on their website for non-commercial use). The publishers of the journals get most of their income from sponsoring conferences and membership fees. Everyone's happy. The content is largely free, and people are making money.
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Sort of Hard to Parse
After reading twice, I am pretty sure that you, Andrew, my hero, are in favor of free information. But you wrote too ironically. That obscures your message.
Smart people may not know what you are writing, and they have plenty of clearer stuff to read. Please take a look at what you wrote, and clean it up.
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They want to have it both ways
The days of research empires are definitely coming to an end no matter how much they try to stop it from happening. The battlefield for the right to scientific information is currently fought on the internet. Universities used to pay lot of money to get subscriptions to scientific journals. With time, they only have relatively less expensive e-journals saving lot of cost and space. At the same time, researchers are not even allowed to post their own published work in their own web page. This is because the publishing house making it difficult to avoid law suites if one does something similar. At the same time, most of the research is done using public money. Go figure how the pages printed on the internet becomes copyrighted when the work is done using public money, researchers get no money for writing a good article and reviewers who take time to validate the claims are not paid a dime!
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It's not all profit
It may be true that scientific publishers are old, stodgy, and out of touch. However, it is also true that many of them are, in fact, not for profit. They charge as little as they can manage and still get by, and what money they do make is put towards grants, education, and intiatives designed to -- believe it or not -- make as much of their content as they can afford freely available, particularly to those who need it most, such as researchers in developing countries and medical patients.
There is no doubt that the internet is forcing radical changes in how scientific information is distributed. And yes, some journals do have a financial interest in maintaining the status quo. However, many, many others do not; they are simply trying to provide valuable services to the scientific and education communities, and they should not be tarred with the same brush.
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Peer Review
What happens to peer review if the journals go away?
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Nature is part of the problem too...not the solution
Just keep in mind that Nature is also a for-profit journal, owned and operated by a large publishing company (NPG, owned by the von Holtzprinck pubishing group) that does not support open access in any way. Wiley and Elsevier (and NPG) have exploited the market for a long time, but most of the top journals, like Nature (NPG) and Cell (Elsevier) remain the most highly respected in the field and--frankly--the ones in which the publications that make or break careers appear.
The PLoS model is not yet sustainable. By Nature's own (possibly flawed) accounting, open access will cost nearly $5000/paper to sustain. With NIH funding decreasing (in real dollars), the push for open access is only going to work if the editoral process is abolished. Quality control does matter.
I support--and publish--open access research. But this simplistic analysis does not service to anyone. What the author might want to mention is that many publishers already comply with the current NIH policy of making all research papers freely available 6 months after initial publication.
I won't be sorry to see the Elseviers and Natures of the world fall--but only if the funding that can provide for a competent editorial process can be maintained. With the NIH funding less grants now than any time in the last 15 years, it's hardly the time to be pressing this issue.
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Some generalizations debunked
First, science journals are not old and stodgy. The two biggest in the field, Nature & Science, are actually more like magazines than journals & will turn down research not because it isn't important, but because it isn't sexy enough or they published too many articles on that topic lately. If you find them difficult to get through, you probably just haven't spent enough time picking up current vocabulary and concepts.
There are of course stodgy journals -- and also ones so radical they are full of crap & die within a few years. There are also many excellent journals well worth reading.
Second, lots of journals make money, and some publishers (notably Elsevier) make a fortune by buying up the "must have" journals for a field then cranking up the subscription rates. The American Psychological Association produces the Journals of Experimental Psychology & uses the proceeds to support themselves --- and they cost very little to subscribe to. So I can't believe it costs Elsevier $1000 a year per subscriber to publish its leading journals.
I think it's fine for journals to charge reasonable rates to pay their publishers & maintain their service. It is useful to have a centralized organization for peer review (though notice the reviewers and most of the editors are not paid!!) and a regular index of good articles. But I also think scientists have to be allowed to publish their articles in electronic form on preprint archives, on their web pages, etc. Nearly all science is paid for with public money, and deservingly so, since open access to knowledge helps boost our economy.