MIT can honor Aaron Swartz by fighting to make journals open to everyone

I'd love to see data on this, so I can see why my experience is atypical: are conventions different in some fields than others? Do I just have good luck? Am I misremembering or just wrong (which is possible)? The original article states, "Much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" and I'd really like to know exactly which articles Manjoo has looked for and been unable to find w/out a university license. Institutional access needs to be a lot more comprehensive than what almost any individual needs access to, so I don't think that their subscription costs really are compelling evidence against my experience.

I'm kind of surprised that no one's pointed out an easy and really effective step MIT could take unilaterally: make all of the journals the MIT Press publishes open access (MIT is also a publisher). Some of them are among the best journals in their fields (e.g. the Quarterly Journal of Economics is one of the 4 most prestigious journals in econ and the Review of Economics and Statistics is very very good).

Hiring/tenure attitudes can include respect for people who choose to avoid closed-access publishers. This doesn't punish people who continue to publish the old way. If done right, it only helps the careers of those who avoid closed journals.

By the way, I somewhat snarkily complained that your comment was snarky. That was hypocritical of me, at least in spirit. Sorry about that. I like non-snarky, straightforward comments.

I'm glad you're signed up at the cost of knowledge. My personal role in open access is mainly as the creator of that site.

Not in a democracy. For a democratic system to work, the entire population needs to be educated well enough to make a rational choice when they are asked to vote.

If you want a system where knowledge is a "product," what you want is a plutocracy: a system where the wealthy rule, because only the wealthy are educated enough to rule. I cannot speak for you, but I live in a country that was founded on a principle of representative democracy and which has a constitution that is meant to prevent the establishment of any sort of aristocracy, plutocracy included.

"it is necessary to ensure that others invest the time and incur the opportunity cost of doing things that further human knowledge"

That is not what the subscription fees for academic journals are for; the authors of scientific articles are almost never paid by the publishers who collect fees for access to those articles. The purpose of journal fees is and has always been to monetize the publishing industry itself; once upon a time, before there was an Internet or a Web, that was the best known method of mass-distributing scientific journals and other academic writing.

The "opportunity cost" of research is paid for by the government and by the researchers themselves. The overwhelming majority of professional researchers are being paid less to do their research than they would to work in private industry. Graduate students, whose work constitutes a sizable portion of the research work that is done, are paid almost nothing -- barely enough to live on. There is no "return on investment" to speak of; all a researcher gains from publishing a paper, in strict economic terms, is a padded CV that might help that researcher advance their career (but which will do little to help them make as much money as they would in a corporate job). Researchers are willing to forgo a higher salary for various reasons, but there is a common theme, which is a high philosophical ideal: the work is more intellectually interesting, there is a chance to contribute to the greater pool of human knowledge, working as a university professor allows one to impart knowledge onto the next generation, there are bigger problems to solve than what corporations are doing, etc.

"I would rather that research and knowledge is entirely funded by private money and the private sector than by government fiat."

There are two problems with that:

1. The private sector tends to focus education on vocational training. There is certainly a place in the world for such training, and we could not have a society of specialized workers without some form of vocational training, but we need more from our education system than job training. Again, if we want to even pretend that we are a democracy, we have to at least have a populace that is able to read and understand the implications of major political issues.

2. Private sector research tends to shy away from big, risky lines of work that may have no payoff at all. There are few exceptions to this rule; the most prominent is Microsoft Research, which is one of the only "academic" research labs in private industry and which is a place where researchers are doing things nobody else is willing to touch. The development of things like the Internet, nuclear power, the space program, genome mapping, and other "big ideas" would almost certainly have not been possible without government funding, because the key, foundational work of these things had no commercial value whatsoever, with commercial value being realized only after a great deal of risky research.

"failure to publish may mean losing your job but then that is because publish is part and parcel of your job"

Except that people are not paid to "write papers," they are paid to "do research," which is supposed to be reported on by writing papers. Researchers who are under pressure to publish more papers can always use "old tricks" like taking a single good result and splitting it into multiple small results that can be published one at a time, or publishing a good result and then publishing multiple tiny variations on that result. As I noted above, researchers do not generally choose their careers because of the pay; it is equally true that researchers do not choose their careers because they are excited by the idea of publishing a lot of journal articles.

"this still doesn't constitute coercion"

I think you should look up the definition of "coercion" in the dictionary:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/coercion

Threatening someone with unemployment if they fail to do a particular thing is coercion by definition.

"validation in an "industry" where there are few objective measures of a person's relative performance as a researcher"

Counting the number of journal articles a person published is not even a remotely objective method of judging their performance as a researcher. It is on the level of counting the number of lines of code a person writes as a measure of their performance as a programmer. The only reason it is used as a measure of anything is because the people in charge of hiring decisions often lack the time or expertise needed to closely examine a researcher's work, so they just combine the number of papers published with the perceived prestige of the journals those papers were published in and use that as an approximation. I have seen good work get rejected from top journals, and I have seen mediocre work get accepted to those same journals, just like I have seen 10 lines of code that does more than 1000 lines of code in the same language.

I doubt there is a market-based solution to this, because it is not an economic problem. It is an academic problem that stems from the policies and approach we take to judging the quality of research for employment purposes. When a university is considering hiring a professor, they do not ask their faculty to read that professor's published work thoroughly; instead, they ask the faculty to judge whether or not that professor will bring in grant money (it is unlikely that private sector funding would truly change this; you see similar patterns of behavior out of the private sector, on both sides), if that professor can increase or maintain the school's prestige, etc. Teaching is low on the list of priorities, and a person who spends all their time chasing after big, difficult, and risky problems has a lower chance of being hired than a person who follows tried-and-true approaches to research strategy.

Review and editing is often done by volunteers, so this should not be a problem: we should encourage people to voluntarily review and edit journals that are freely accessible and shared. Assuming, of course, that the people who are in a position to do so actually care about making their work available for everyone to read, rather than just to the ivory tower.

It's easy to make the taxpayers pay for everything but I'd feel better about it if the proponents of this were at least actually actively using the research in question.

This still doesn't answer the question of how properly to prioritize the taxpayer funding involved. Fully funding every journal gives no incentive for efficient operation and would be incredibly wasteful. But if we decide not to fully funding all journals, who makes that decision? What criteria do they use? What specialized training should they have? Etc., etc.

If most of those institutions are looking at the same set of prestigious, closed journals, avoiding those journals is not an option for an ambitious academic --- and if MIT starts insisting they must, good talent will go elsewhere.

That's why this is hard.

Note, I mentioned nothing about credibility or it's sarcastic variant "credibility". Though, saying you appeared in Wikipedia is hardly prestigious, and I like Wikipedia.

> I'm willing to wait +/- 20 years until all those old folks die off or become irrelevant and today's late teens can't remember a world without Wikipedia and have never seen a printed encyclopedia.

I should hope you'll need to wait a great deal longer than that! I hope for a day when I am so old even I can't remember a day without Wikipedia.

It's good idea to use arxiv because they enforce submission standards. For-profit journals can't do that and society presses try but are not always successful. What happens if arxiv decides it needs to charge for submissions to defray operational costs? It's too early to tell.

They also do not prohibit individual journals from charging for publishing a paper. Not different from today's open access policies.

Bottom line -- for me its not different. It's just someone saying, "I think I can do it cheaper this way."