How much longer can the antiquated system of paywalls for scientific work continue? Are there sites working on disrupting this? Why isn't there a free site that the most prominent scientists all agree to only publish to? My guess is that there is a lot of power centralized in these old publications and the scientists, in large part, dare not piss them off. Is there truth to that? b_b, theadvancedapes, mk -My resident scientists that I follow. Are there new places that are all about open-sourced knowledge in the sciences?
I utilize Science Open and LibGen. The current system can't hold for much longer. Most journals I know of, including top name journals like Nature, are already piloting open access formats. I might be overly optimistic but I don't think the current paywall structure will exist by the end of 2015.
Paywalls like that won't exist in the future but it will be a hard battle to get there. Publishers are steadfast in their ways and, for a variety of reasons, don't see the urgency of restructuring the way they do things. This is a quote from The Everything Store on how Bezos handled moving Amazon from selling traditional books to ebooks. It sheds light on why companies have a hard time shifting: Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.” Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Even though it is obvious that the world was transitioning to more digital mediums, this transition would do harm to their existing business model: selling physical books. Even though it was obvious after music piracy and introduction of iTunes/iPod that every business was shifting to digital, companies have a hard time doing something that might harm their existing business model. It isn't simply that they don't realize this or are too out of touch. It's that moving to these new markets is a risk and will do a ton of damage to how they currently make money. From the outside we say: these paywalls won't survive. From the inside they say: if we take down the paywall, how will we make money. Bezos and Amazon won the ebook transition because Bezos saw that even though it would do damage in the short term, it would be the only way to win in the long term.By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.
Part of the problem is also that: 1. People who run major companies work insanely long hours, have no time for leisure, and as such most become incredibly out of touch with new trends and technologies (beyond their immediate sphere of activity). Even Steve Jobs was frankly incredibly out of touch with how many people wanted to use the iPhone, in its initial incarnation. You could tell, for example, that he didn't use it in bed (or he would have figured out the need for a screen rotation lock from the get go). Likely he slept few hours and simply didn't have time to do this. 2. They are so beholden to the reporting cycle and shareholders in terms of needing to constantly post increased profits that they are effectively forced to take a short term view 3. They still - as do many consumers - buy into the myth of "too big too fail"/so-big-must-be-eternal. I remember someone buying expensive Sony minidisc things after the first iPod came out (and bear in mind it was far from the first mp3 player). With ebooks a good parallel is game downloads: they haven't killed the game industry, even though they've freed people from having to buy physical copies. And yet you still have bizarre anachronisms such as Xbox requiring not only a disc to be bought, but retained in the console during play (even after preloading).
Right now there are several places where scientists can post their research, I use arxiv.org, but there are many more. However, there is another problem: most of the research done in the past is locked by giant companies like JSTOR and Springer. If you want to read what Heisenberg wrote 80 years ago you have to pay 40 u$s to some guy at Springer (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01397280). That is the real problem, the scientific heritage can't be controlled by a handful of publishing companies.