Why publish research for free? Because some researchers who love creating and sharing knowledge worked out ways to get paid anyway, I suppose. Besides, they were already giving their work away, as do the reviewers. Often, work paid for with public money, which is public property.

The whole industry started with researchers writing letters to each other because they felt a need, or an obligation, to show others what they had discovered. Aside from taking over the task of hiring a few editors and compositors, I would be hard pressed to say what value an academic publisher brings to the table today.

Sounds like a geographical clue to your identity :)
Thanks for another great post, I hope common sense prevails in Washington. Enjoy your weekend.

http://http//lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/feed/

You’ve got an extra http// in there at the beginning.

[AL: Thanks for the feedback. I'll report it to LJ.]

Please check your RSS feed. It appears to be broken.

[AL: it's working for me. Anyone else having problems?]

Except we don’t have good free content (in the academic peer reviewed sense) that’s just a Google search away. The expectation that everything should be available immediately at no cost is the problem, not the solution.

I also don’t see how hackers and social media are going to fix the problem either. These so-called hackers are the same small but vocal minority that gets up in arms whenever anyone suggests that intellectual property should be paid for. They’re still wrong whether we’re talking about downloading the latest season of Two and a Half Men or pilfering the JSTOR database. There might be a bit of flash in the pan outrage via social media, but that focus will be channeled to cute pictures of grammatically questionable cats by next week.

Academic publishing is changing because of the Internet,to be sure, but this is just a bunch of kids trying to mask intellectual property theft as a freedom of speech issue.

I read somewhere (can’t find it now) that some people believe that he either chose JSTOR deliberately because they wouldn’t press charges, or because he is actually doing a study of some sort.

But what I find really interesting is how this movement is going mainstream. I keep thinking that the younger generation expects to find all the latest information on current subjects freely available on the web. It’s not too hard to find content created by experts and innovators. So it must be puzzling to young people why there is such a fuss over a bunch of old, static articles. The biggest question with this story seems to be why he chose such boring content, but I think the point might be that boring-ness. Add the availability of good free content to the younger generations’ expectations (shown by the adoption of this trend toward supporting hackers), multiplied by the nature of social media… I just don’t see the academic publishing model holding up.