Some good arguments against journal paywalls.
This is true. I'm guilty of it. It's actually very likely that I'll be submitting to PLOS One soon. However, TBH a paper published in Nature or Science probably gets more reads than any open journal article would, and it's difficult to find an institution that doesn't have them. I wouldn't fault anyone too much for publishing in those flagship journals.
I am guilty of publishing in paid journals as well, but it's kind of a trap for my area of research. Well, not really a trap, but we would need critical mass on switching over. (Though, it's pretty common in our community to post the papers on our websites, "illegally"- which you can find with Google Scholar) For us, conference proceedings are more important than journals; but, to give a talk at the important conferences, that are sponsored by the publishers, it ends up in the publisher's journal. As it stands, to be seen by others in the community, we need to publish in these journals and conferences. Not to say that we couldn't do it, it would need inertia to switch over. Yes, it can be done, but it won't happen over-night and I get that it starts with us.
Specifically, high performance computing and scientific visualization. It's fairly typical across all computer science research, though. Well, at least the conference focus. It might be different for the theoreticians because they are closer to mathematics.
Excuse me, I misspoke. I just went back and read my most recent copyright transfer agreement. It states the journal owns the copyright to the specific article, even though the authors retain rights to the data themselves. There is a specific exception for authors to send individual copies to colleagues, provided no money changes hands, but publishing the article directly (in print or online) is prohibited.
This system is not long for the world. Enough people hate it that it will collapse soon. In the beginning online only journals, especially open access ones, were looked at as the ghetto of academic publishing. These days there are several that people take very seriously. PLoS One (and all the family of PLoS journals) is the most famous, and I really respect what they do. I think you'll continue to see these grow until they just take over. To paraphrase Max plank: There are no scientific revolutions; the older generation just eventually dies.
Fuck journals. We all own the content, because we all pay for it with our tax dollars. And the scientists pay to have the stuff published (like sometimes over $2000 per article), so really we own that, too. Now that the technology is available there's not one single good reason why most government funded reasearch shouldn't be public. Its not like the editors and reviewers are getting paid, so that's easily transferable. NIH should have their own journal network.
Hear, hear! Right now there are papers I want to read - papers that are very relevant to what I'm currently studying - but I can't afford to pay the appropriate fees. If it's behind a paywall, I don't read it.
I think this is pretty much how it goes for pretty much everybody who is not a researcher. I would love have easier access to information even if it's only to check sources when reading an article in a popular science magazine.
I'm getting curious now as to how this is within the various engineering fields. Engineering is not necessarily knowledge everybody should have access to.
Lets start with a small explanation about engineering and science. There is engineering and there is engineering science. Engineering science is like normal science only focused on engineering thing. For example, at the moment there is a lot of research in the structure of the internet. This research can be used by others to make recommendations and to create systems based on that idea, just like with research in every other scientific discipline. Engineering uses science in order to create something. Various things can be created, like cars, computers etc. But not all these things are for the public to know, like how to build a atomic bomb or how to genetically engineer a super influenza virus. These are good things to actually research, but you'll want to keep access to this kind of information restricted. Another point to note is that engineering mainly takes place in companies. Companies don't want everybody to know how their products work, while the things they used may be very interesting research topics. This also means that there was no public funding, so the company can do with the info what they want. I know that a pay wall is probably not the best solution, but engineering knowledge is not always good knowledge to give to just anybody. EDIT: added a small bit.
Exactly, if your work with a company is available to everybody then you are now worth much less to that company. It's also why you have to (generally) sign a non-disclosure agreement for these types of jobs, and I would say that these things help to foster competition between companies. That, and you don't want to make it even easier for other countries to reverse engineer your product.
Reverse engineering is exactly why some people don't apply for a patent anymore in the Electrical/Computer Engineering world. When there is a patent, reverse engineering a product and building a copy suddenly becomes a whole lot easier. And if you change the product just a little bit, the patent doesn't even apply.
I just looked it up for my field (Electrical Engineering). IEEE is the go to association for publishing in the EE field. When I probed a little deeper, I saw that one needs a subscription to read any of the articles. You even need to be a member of IEEE before you can get a subscription. So essentially, pretty much everything is paywalled. Even the standards, which is ridiculous. It's like having to pay in order to read the law.
IEEE membership is hardly exclusive. I was a mechanical engineering major once upon a time, and they try to hit me up for membership every year. I could then buy any IEEE article I wanted to. I'm pretty much "just anybody" as far as the engineering community is concerned.
IEEE does more than just EE. Software engineering and aerospace engineering are also subjects they publish about. And they need members. Otherwise there won't be enough funding for them to continue existing I guess.