This article sparked a tangential thought: Why do academics agree to participate in this farce? Why, in this age of incredibly easy-to-share information, do they not simply publish their work themselves (put a PDF on a server somewhere!)? Barring that, why don't universities, all of which have fairly sophisiticated IT departments, host their own researchers results free-of-charge?
Clearly doing research as an academic means swallowing a poison pill.
I ask these questions because a lot of what we do here is similar to what a computer science researcher does. But since we don't answer to anyone, we can publish our results on git hub or a blog, or on jsfiddle or on blo.cks.org.
Which of course begs the question[1]: why purpose do traditional journals even serve? If the content is contributed, and the editing is contributed, is the only thing they contribute the use of the trademark on the journal publication? This is an important question to ask because it seems to me if we gave academics another, better publishing method they'd probably take it.
Because career advancement requires publication in peer-reviewed, quality journals in a relevant field. The people at the top aren't generally keen to delegitimize the reason they are at the top. :) It's hard to fight that battle on top of all the other maneuvering and petty bullshit an academic already has to put up with.
This is why open-access tend to be sudden revolts of entire subfields. Everyone gets together and says, fuck it, we know how to judge ourselves, so let's stop signing over copyright.
I would suggest pecuniary rather than moral reasoning, and a sense of duty to the job rather than the civilization.
I don't think that many "academics" (quotes do to the varied nature of the groups under that label) feel a particularly strong duty to "do the right thing" about spreading knowledge especially if it may cost them their funding or job.
Clearly doing research as an academic means swallowing a poison pill.
I ask these questions because a lot of what we do here is similar to what a computer science researcher does. But since we don't answer to anyone, we can publish our results on git hub or a blog, or on jsfiddle or on blo.cks.org.
Which of course begs the question[1]: why purpose do traditional journals even serve? If the content is contributed, and the editing is contributed, is the only thing they contribute the use of the trademark on the journal publication? This is an important question to ask because it seems to me if we gave academics another, better publishing method they'd probably take it.