> The only reason the journals can do this is that the governments that fund the research allow them to. A simple change in the rules for government funded research would fix that.
I think that this excellent point is what's missing from most of these discussions: a realisation that most academics, who are under intense pressures to publish, simply don't have the freedom to "vote with their feet" ("vote with their papers", I suppose), and that the change must come from an institutional body. That's why I love open-access policies like the NIH's (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm):
> The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
(Actually, this seems to be weaker than what I remember; is there another law that says that NIH-funded works must appear in some open-access forum, or am I misremembering the import of the law?)
The NIH open access policy is not enough. First, it only applies to NIH funded work. Work funded by other agencies does not fall under these rules. Also - I don't think posting papers to Pubmed Central 1 year after publication is quick enough to advance science. And furthermore, the papers are only made freely available in Pubmed Central. The NIH policy does not require papers to be "open" (as in, free to use and reuse in any way one wants).
Oh - and Science is one of, if the the, only journal that does not do deposition to Pubmed Central for the authors. The authors have to do it themselves and many do not.
To be sure!—I agree with all of your points. However, we have to start somewhere, and it is something—I'd rather have an imperfect solution, as long as it stimulates a search for the perfect one, than no solution. For example, as far as I know, no common grants in mathematics carry this stipulation. (I am thinking here of the situation where it is (relatively) easy now to obtain non-DRM'd music; the initial solutions were far from perfect, but they showed that the world didn't end when they were implemented.)
I think that this excellent point is what's missing from most of these discussions: a realisation that most academics, who are under intense pressures to publish, simply don't have the freedom to "vote with their feet" ("vote with their papers", I suppose), and that the change must come from an institutional body. That's why I love open-access policies like the NIH's (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm):
> The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
(Actually, this seems to be weaker than what I remember; is there another law that says that NIH-funded works must appear in some open-access forum, or am I misremembering the import of the law?)