Why isn publicly-funded scientific research freely available?
Projects funded with federal money should be available in some form through NTIS or some other agency. I think it’s a requirement of the funding. I know a lot of people like to moan (and rightly so) about buying papers from them, but unfortunately they aren’t really funded and they have to support themselves somehow. The federal government doesn’t care about getting information to the people.
In the United States we have a longstanding approach to the commons in which we socialize debt and privatize profit. It isn’t just or fair, but it’s a matter of practice across almost all sectors of public society. If you doubt this simply consider the notion that we might “bail out” sub-prime lenders, while allowing their officers (and even shareholders) to keep their profits. That said, you are confusing access with free access. You do have access to the publications of which you speak, it just isn’t the type of access you would wish to have. You are free to use interlibrary loan and other resources at your local library to get the articles you want without subscription. You may also compare this to the works produced by the Government Printing Office, many of which one still has to pay for, although they were produced by public employees using public resources. Many are online, now, but that did not used to be the case, and I remember wandering around the GPO bookstore in the late 8
Publishing and distributing peer-reviewed scientific papers has certain unavoidable costs. Originally, these costs were bore by subscribers similar to any other publisher’s business model. Tradition and prestige were built up around the process and around certain journals to the point where the quality of the journal was used as a quick marker for the quality of the research. Attempts to deviate from this standard practice basically penalized the scientist as their work was looked down upon if published in a non-traditional manner (or inferior/cheap journal). I’m not sure many scientists are happy with the situation (but the for-profit publishers certainly aren’t objecting). Some people have tried to start open-access journals which are becoming more popular but struggle with money as they rely on grants, donations, and fees paid by the authors. The internet certainly has brought down some costs so that’s helped, and grant
To expand on Horace Rumpole and Durin’s Bane, I think that journals provide two services to researchers in a field: 1. Peer review is (presumably) some assurance of the quality of the paper, so readers can trust that results are not fabricated or a result of a poor study design; and 2. Journals are like an old-school metafilter for the amazing amount of research that is conducted every month. If you’re working in a certain field, doing your own research, you can’t possibly keep up with everything else that is being published–that could be a full time job in itself!–so it’s simpler and more efficient to pay someone else (the editors of a journal) to sift through it all and separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m skeptical that the prices that journals charge are a real reflection of how valuable the two services they provide are–really, since few people pay for this themselves, it’s easy to make an argument that journals overcharge because institutions are less price-sensitive to vari
