[DaveWalk]

What motivates the senior scientists to do this? Is it because they want to guide the latest research in high-impact journals, oblivious of any profit motive? In the life sciences, many top researchers are actually editors or on the board of journals in their field.

From my experience, there is no doubt that relationships with editors help a scientist publish in better journals. And sour relationships make it harder -- not impossible, but harder. This system is pure meritocracy only in our minds.

[roel_v]

I get voted into oblivion every time I post this when this topic comes up (which is like, every other day), but the fact of the matter is that nobody cares about 'open access' in academia (well, not 'nobody' in the pedantic nerd sense, but 'nobody' as in 'only a vocal but ultimately insignificant minority', mostly very junior researchers - who usually don't even have their PhD's yet; the number of senior faculty staff who spends time on writing blog posts about this is minute). In fields where there are elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations (but, of course, who call themselves 'principled' and 'not corrupted by money' and that sort of spin on it) like CS and physics the proportion is higher, but still not enough to make a real difference.

The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers (as opposed to the 'open access' 'advocates' who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only all research was downloadable without logging in anywhere) has it through their universities, or you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way. The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers. People jump at the chance of sending their papers to that one person in the world (besides their parents) who actually cares enough to ask about it.

So there is no practical incentive for most people to care enough to put effort into changing the status quo, and the current situation is maybe not optimal but well, neither is the quality of the coffee in the staff room, and if given the choice, most researchers would choose a better coffee machine over all journals being open access.

Note that I don't care one way or another; I don't gain in any way from papers not being publicly accessible. If tomorrow everything is open access, or all open access journals stop existing, won't make one bit of difference to my life. But what I do find annoying is the incessant whining about this topic from people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever, but who will take any opportunity to declare how big bad faceless 'them' is the personification of evil and how everybody else should change to make the world fit their worldview better, while those who are actually affected by this have many other things to worry about and don't care as long at doesn't cause extra work (or change for the sake of it).

[random_comment]

Hello. Mid-career scientist/engineer/entrepreneur here.

The majority of academics I have talked to about this in real life (let's say... 30-40 out of 50) thought we sorely needed open access in terms of:

- The public pays for science, they should be able to see the result

- Lots of out-of-work and between-jobs academics, scientists-turned-entrepreneur, scientists in small companies etc. that can't access a research library

- It's morally wrong to have the public sector hand so much money to a few private companies like Elsevier for doing very little besides existing and rent-seeking.

- Scientists and the public in developing countries and third world countries have a very limited ability to get involved in global science and engineering when it's paywalled.

- In fields like medicine especially, paywalls are literally preventing the public from knowing how to be healthy.

Have you considered that maybe the reason why for example, "The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers." is because it's not openly and freely published?

I suspect perhaps the reason you are being downvoted (on other sites presumably) is because most people think your view is wrong or unacceptable i.e. immoral. Have you considered that possibility?

[a3_nm]

> mostly very junior researchers - who usually don't even have their PhD's yet

Do you have evidence to support this claim? I have heard major open access support coming from very senior and influent members of diverse research communities.

Even assuming that you are right, don't you think that age may be a confounding variable? Of course the opponents to the status quo are not often found among its the most established members. Of course researchers who have always worked with the Internet are more hostile towards editors as they have never known the times where they were providing a useful and nontrivial service.

> elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations

This is ad hominem, and a weird one at that. I don't see how the "value of interpersonal relations" has any relationship with the issue at hand.

> The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers [...] has it [...]

Sci-Hub was serving 200k download requests per day in early 2016 (source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pira...). so it looks like in fact many people need to access scientific articles and are not served well by the current system. (You may say that it doesn't matter as long as Sci-Hub is around, but Sci-Hub cannot get funding easily or be advertised widely, because of the legal insecurity around the precious service that it provides.)

> who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only

The issue isn't about how many papers we would read. Open access advocates usually have access to subscriptions. The problem is about people outside academia.

Yes, many papers are actually not read that much at all, and certainly are not read a lot outside of academia. But it's certainly not true that there is zero interest for academic research outside academia. The most obvious example are the numerous HN submissions and comments about stories related to open access, often coming for people who care about getting access to scientific articles but are not academics.

Further, the problem of closed-access is that it perpetuates the disconnection between academia and the rest of the world. If you have to hunt for scientific papers, it's sure that not many people outside academia will want to read them. The same for developing countries: poor universities can't get access to research, so they can't contribute to research, and are locked out of the system. Open-access is about saying that science is not a private club but is open to anyone.

> you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way

(1.) You have to know that you can do this, most people outside academia do not, and it's not obvious: usually when faced with a paywall on, e.g. an online newspaper, you don't ask the authors. (2.) This only works for authors who have contact information online, are responsive, in particular are alive. (3.) As a researcher I download around a paper a day on average, if I have to find contact info and write and send an email and wait for a reply for each of them, it adds up. (4.) If the authors send you their papers, they may be violating their editor's copyright, so this is still a broken system. You can say it doesn't matter and that I'm a dogmatic purist, but meh, to me it's not OK that a third party can tell me I don't have the right to share my work. It's not OK that distributing my work is an integral part of my job but is a legal minefield because of a problem which shouldn't exist.

> people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever

As a researcher, I have to sign away to editors the rights to the research that I produce, so that the editors can sell it to unsuspecting people in exchange for having put zero effort in doing the research. Meanwhile I have to work around legal obstacles to put my work online under an open license. I'd like to tell people to do what they want with my work (the way I do with my code with open-source licenses), but I can't, because maybe it's not true and publishers would have the right to object. As a taxpayer, I see the government wasting tens of millions in subscriptions to journals so that universities can buy access to the contents of public research, so I am an accomplice of this if I publish in closed-access journals. I have seen many good students get disgusted of academia when it turned out that they had to give away all rights to their work so that some corporation could make money out of it; many of my non-academic friends blame me and other researchers for their participation to this ridiculous system.

There are some valid points in what you write, but I don't understand the hostility. Even if open access mattered as little as what you seem to think, it's still a step in the right direction, so why so much contempt?