Let’s be real for a moment. The publishers may be driven by money, but scientific careerism isn’t – it’s about ideology, stability, influence and ultimately status. The currency is the publication, or citation, which is scaled in value (why journals advertise exposure ratings) and bartered and traded (through unearned multiple authorships).

The formal mechanism by which this currency is controlled is the peer review process, which is less about quality and intellectual honesty than about controlling the current value of types of currency (maintaining current orthodoxy).

There have been some histories of fraud in science over the years (all that fudging and cheating through undergrad and the learned prostitution to a committee through grad school – did you think that somehow stopped once the research positions were awarded?). I believe a review would reveal that in those rare cases when incompetence or counterfeiting is exposed, it’s not generally to the credit of the peer review process, but in spite of it.

But perhaps I’m unfair.

I agree completely with Robert Merkel that the publishers are leeches. I was part of the academic community for a number of years, and have both been a contributer and reviewer. At this point in time, the publishers barely have to typeset anything, because of software like WORD and LaTeX. When I reviewed, the only thing I really recommended rejection for was bad, unclear writing. The research itself was honest, if not all that exciting. The peer-review process would effectively go on in an informal way even without the publishers, because in most fields, things are so specialized and sub-fields so small that everyone needs to be concerned about their reputations. If someone makes up research, it is either obvious to anyone familiar with the subject, or will be exposed soon enough. People's web pages will link to the research they find useful, if it is published on the web.

Sometimes the publishers don't even do any peer review. I was invited by Elsevier to submit a paper for publication because my abstract was accepted to a conference I was participating in. The real "peer-review" work (checking for relevance and rigor) was done by the conference committee who accepted the paper for the conference, not Elsevier. Elsevier's role in this case was simply to stick everything that the authors had written, and in most cases typeset themselves, into a "special volume" that they could charge for. Their attempt at "proof reading" was laughable. They sent me a list of corrections, six sentences which their editors had modified for grammar. The problem was, the editors clearly didn't speak English as a native language, as they inserted lots of articles that made no sense (e.g. "wavelengths of the interest"). So I had to spend my time submitting corrections to each of the sentences that their editors messed up, and return everything back to the way I had written it. So they contributed nothing, and made more work for me.

By the way one of my pet peeves is that when I search for terms in Google, abstract pages from the publishers pop up, though they don't have the papers available for free. I guess they use all the keywords from the paper (not just the words in the abstract) to draw you to their site. It really wastes my time. It would be nice if Google separated sites that make you pay to see the things you were searching for from the ones that take a more honest approach.

Last I checked, hard disk sizes were still doubling every couple of years or so, and text search and retrieval systems use algorithms and technologies in the public domain. The cost of archiving electronic journals is utterly trivial compared to the cost of archiving dead tree books and magazines, like thousands of university libraries around the world already do. They already manage in the immensely more difficult task of preserving millions of rare paper books and journals; why wouldn't they be able to manage the immensely easier task of keeping a few servers with big drive arrays backed up, powered-up, and running decent indexing software?

And academic publishers are leeches. They do very little actual work; they just shuffle papers between submitters and reviewers, and put the end results on their servers. For this trivial service they charge like wounded bulls, and are free to continue to increase these charges into the never-never because IP laws give them the keys for many decades at a time.

One other significant issue is, how will the journals be indexed and accessed in the future? Scientific journals aren't like magazines, where you read them once and then throw them out. They are used for decades. And there has to be a way find the information, among the hundreds of thousands of articles in the scientific literature.

I'm a chemist, and I can't just google to find the research I need for my work. I need a specialized search engine that allows me to search for chemical structures. A few weeks ago, I used a journal article from 1917 - the only reason I was able to find that article was because the structures of all the compounds referenced in the article were indexed and available for searching. If an article is published on someone's web site, it's unlikely that it will be indexed and made available in that way, either today or 10, 20 or 50 years from now, for future scientists.

There are some major disadvantages to the current system, but what works for the latest "press-friendly" research might not work so well for other types of scientific journals. And while it's important to have the information today, it's also crucially important that the information is available in the future - and in a format that can be searched and accessed.

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.