[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.