QUOTE(dtobias @ Wed 20th July 2011, 12:13pm)
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...These industries all have in common archaic business models built up in the days when bulky physical objects had to be manufactured and distributed, necessitating all sorts of expensive infrastructure that isn't needed nowadays for electronic distribution. It's notably primarily people connected with this management/marketing/corporate end who are shouting the loudest for draconian protection of intellectual property...
There's a difference with academic publishing, though. On the surface, it sounds like it would be a good thing to make scholarly journal articles available for free to the public, soon after (or even immediately after) publication. But a significant percentage of people in academia, particularly in the sciences, would still suffer quite a lot if their articles were made widely available that quickly - and financial and intellectual-property considerations aren't the only reasons. In some cases those things actually have very little to do with it.
Rather than try to explain it in the abstract though, here's an obvious case-in-point. Suppose you're a biologist on a decent college/university faculty, doing stem-cell research. If you're reasonably diligent and talented, you might publish one or two papers a year. Of course, nobody reads them except for other biologists, unless
maybe one of them happens to be a "blockbuster" or "game-changer." A high-profile paper like that might garner you a prize or award, even a better job, but other than those possibilities it's likely to make little difference to your place in the funding food chain. In most cases it's still going to be publish, add-to-CV, apply-for-grant, deal with review process, continue your research if you win, maybe try again if you lose, lather, rinse, repeat. (And somewhere in there, hopefully get tenure, and maybe even a decent dental plan.)
The thing is, all of this is usually done in relative quiet and obscurity, but now imagine if all those papers about your otherwise highly controversial stem-cell research were to be readily available to the public, quickly found in Google searches, etc...
Now what do you have? Right-wing religious nuts camping out in front of the science building, holding up placards accusing you of killing babies, writing letters to families of prospective students, etc., etc. Admittedly, you might have that anyway if you're unlucky, or if you have a tendency towards braggadocio or self-promotion. But most of the academics I know aren't like that.
There's a reason why college professors, etc., want to preserve the so-called "ivory tower" - it's because they'd rather actually be working than constantly trying to explain and justify their work to people who often have little hope of understanding it, much less supporting it. And if you take that ivory tower away, and make research more subject to popular whim, then less research - and in particular, less
science - gets done. (Science tends to be more expensive, y'see, and therefore harder to justify in the first place.)
What's more, there are LOTS of rather unpleasant people out there who'd be just as happy as can be if that were to happen.