[wgrover]

Your "desk drawer in Tech Square" analogy is apt -- right now our publications are locked in a handful of those drawers, and folks can't even open the drawers unless they've bought keys from Springer/Elsevier/ACS/AIP/ACM/IEEE/etc. And how do we find out what's in the drawers? Searching the databases owned by ISI/Thompson-Reuters and friends, again for a fee.

Sure, a "Github of science" wouldn't turn anyone's basement into a cancer research lab, but it would mean that a lot of researchers at less-affluent universities would finally have full access to the literature of science.

[mechanical_fish]

I loathe the for-profit journals as much as anyone, but I'm deeply suspicious of any hypothesis of the form "the reason why journals still cost money is that we haven't yet invented the right electronic social network for sharing scientific information".

We've had the technology to publish science online for decades. We have tinkered with it dozens of times. The web was originally invented for exactly this purpose. Far older things, like TeX, were invented for this purpose. Nowadays we have everything from PLoS to arXiv to Google Scholar to custom in-house blogs to PDFs sent through email.

The continued existence of for-profit journals is an economic, political, and anthropological problem, not a technological one. PLoS and the like are slowly changing things, but I still suspect that the only way to free our journals within less than a generation or two is to lobby (e.g.) the NIH to require that their funded projects be published in free journals. When a grant agency talks, people listen. When postdocs talk, alas, it makes a very subtle sound. ;)

[enjalot]

I agree with your statements, but perhaps the appeal of a github for science isn't the technology, it's the culture that comes with it. You can run your own git servers and submit patches over email, but when you can fork with the click of a button and do a pull request with another click, it encourages that much more sharing.

I've had this discussion with some of my professors, mostly just about open sourcing research code (I'm in Scientific Computing) and some of them wont do it because they want to squeeze a few publications out of one code and don't want anyone 'stealing' their publication. I find it disturbing, but it's ingrained in the culture. Changing it is important to me, but I don't see how yet.

[stevenbedrick]

The NIH is already actually doing that, at least sort of- any article reporting NIH-funded has to be submitted to PubMed Central, from where anybody can view and download the full text, figures, etc. I believe that there's an embargo exemption that allows journals to hold off on submitting to PMC for a few months or maybe up to a year, but after that it's public.

Right now, it's just NIH, but it's only a matter of time before AHRQ and the other biomedical funding agencies get in on the action, and there's no reason (in principle, anyway) why NSF or DOE couldn't also join in or do something similar on their own.

[chancho]

Where do Google Scholar and CiteSeer fit into this analogy?

Can't speak for other fields, but in CS any outlet worth submitting to will let you post a preprint on your own website, and from there Google Scholar will pick it up and place the link to your free copy right next to the paywall link. It's not a perfect system---it's like an extreme form price discrimination, like when Microsoft turns a blind eye to piracy in emerging markets---but it does give access to those who can't pay, and its not as dystopian as you make it out to be.

[wgrover]

I think that CS is a lot more open than other fields, even putting preprints online and soliciting feedback before publication (that's unheard of in chemistry and biology). You're right that some authors put PDFs of their papers on their websites and Google Scholar finds them, but I frequently need papers that I can only get through interlibrary loan (and I work at MIT; even a relatively wealthy university can't afford everything).