[ek]

Unfortunately, this is something that has to occur as a systematic change. Individual researchers are not to blame, necessarily. When you are told by your university that you must publish or face not getting tenure, what they mean is that you must publish in a peer-reviewed journal (or conference, since most of what we talk about here is CS and CS is still a conference field mostly). We could realign the review process so that it was something taken on by universities, for example, but this will require a major systematic change.

Peer review is important. It will not stop being important, but unfortunately the service of peer review is currently only being offered by mostly for-profit organizations, which is the primary problem.

[udpheaders]

So true. It's not like publishing your paper on your lab's website will satsify the "publish" requirement for obtaining tenure. Why can't we separate the process of peer review from the process of letting a journal handle distribution of the paper?

My pet peeve when downloading articles from journals is that it is a chain of needless HTTP redirects and elaborate cookies. If you are accessing the network from an approved IP address, is all that really necessary? Why can't it be a simple direct download? Answer: Because they've commercialized the process of reading publicly-funded research results. And with that comes the usual mindless hoop-jumping for even the simplest things.

Many investigators will just post a copy on their lab's website anyway. And that's the link that they will often give to students who need a copy of the paper. So the whole scheme of commercializing the publishing of noncommercial research just looks silly.

Don't question it, just follow along.

[danielweber]

I've heard a number of times of people starting "open access" peer-reviewed journals for various fields. The persistence of journals that demand permanent exclusive rights means either those fields are still waiting for some enterprising person to do the heavy work to create the new journal (and manage its reputation), or that the old-fashioned journals are still providing some value that the new guys can't replicate.

Even Nature, one of the most awesome-est journals in the world, demands certain restrictions, like not publishing in another journal. They don't want to do all the work of vetting the article only to find out that it's also in Joe's Fishing And Particle Physics Papers.