Can someone explain me why the researchers themselves don't publish their work for free? The article says they are not paid for the articles so I don't see why they couldn't do that.
Conferences are more important to a scientific career than an OA paper. The people who hire you will in all likelihood have access to your paper even if it's behind a paywall.
Depends on you field of research, maybe? Paper publications make or break early biomedical research careers.
Further, the grants that these funds are paid out of often have travel funds built-in, so conferences are still available.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with the OA-status of those publications - if it's a high-impact journal, then it makes the career, if it's not, then not.
I am a professor and I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago that talked about open access publishing. There were people from many departments and there was one professor there who asking questions that made it clear he didn't know anything about online publishing (he was asking things like "where are the papers stored?" and said something about how "all this online stuff is like Big Brother")
Every researcher I know would publish for free if it wouldn't ruin their career to do otherwise. They want their results disseminated as widely as possible.
Why can't the national/international associations in each field set up simple publishing operations (or pay a U. press to do it), with the same people doing peer review, and use their power to designate the presitage of each journal: 'this will be our tier 1 journal, this one a tier 2, etc.'
Whatever it costs, it would cost far less than the existing setup. I'd think the U. libraries would be happy to share some of their enormous savings to fund the operation.
The real problem is the use of journals as an arbiture of research quality. If it didn’t matter to your career if you published in Nature or PLOS One then everyone would publish in PLOS One. If you are more likely to get a job or grant by publishing in Nature then people will do almost anything to get their work into Nature. We are trying to solve the wrong problem by worrying about journals controlling copyright.
But the control of copyright is a real problem, and i think we underestimate how much it hampers science (esp. considering the wonderful things one could do with machine analysis of the texts)