It's not just prestige though, it's also legitimacy. Scientific journals have formal peer review and it is this process that is supposed to ensure that papers that get published aren't totally spurious. One might argue that NASA could be exempt from this process given its own reputation and level of accountability, but submitting articles to journals for peer review and publication is standard scientific practice.

The paywall is arguably just for business though, a lot of papers get put up on sites like arxiv pre-publication anyway.

I don't see much in the argument from the view of the taxpayer though. In the UK a lot of public funding goes in to research and the papers are largely behind paywalls - Graphene research for example. Now, if we had government subsidized peer review journals - I could definitely get behind that.

"Scientific journals have formal peer review and it is this process that is supposed to ensure that papers that get published aren't totally spurious"

Considering the fact that peer review is done by volunteers, I think this a pretty weak argument. At best you could argue that the publishers are organizing the review process, but even that is suspect -- scientists organize themselves pretty well.

Peer review is orthogonal to copyright issues. Journal publishers serve almost no purpose in the modern world, and the copyrights they hold on scientific articles are doing more to prevent the dissemination of knowledge than to promote scientific research.

This seems to prove too much. Either all scientists are irrational, or they get some real value out of the journals system.

The only value a scientist gets from publishing a journal article is another publication they can add to their CV. A long list of publications is important for any scientist who wants to get funding, and even grad students need to have that long list of publications on their CV if they hope to get a research job later in life. What the journal provides is its name, and nothing else -- because as I said, everything else that goes into a journal is done by volunteers.

Now, once upon a time, journals served a secondary purpose, which was to distribute scientific results on a global scale. Back then, there was no Internet, and printing enough copies of a journal to satisfy the world's needs required industrial equipment. Fortunately those days are done and over with, but unfortunately we are still dealing with the relics of that bygone age in the form of academic publishing companies. Worse, in fact, since today's publishers are far greedier and for more profiteering than many of the publishers of the past.

Really, were it not for copyright, we could cut publishers out of the equation without any ill effects and have a net gain for society by removing all paywalls from scientific articles.

See my post (GP of yours). What scientists get is the prestige of having an accepted article in one of the better journals. The more prestigious journals can then trade on that prestige to force concessions that hurt everyone but themselves and undermine the whole public-funding, knowledge-sharing system. The scientists do it because, often, there is tenure and/or promotion riding on it. Plenty of scientists want open access, but few want to risk their careers to push for it.

All (afaik) UK research councils now have an Open Access mandate. It's a bit of a mess, though, since they keep changing how/who's going to pay for it, and what level of Open Access they mandate. Practically, for physicists, this just means uploading your paper to arXiv.

Open Access is a more subtle economic argument than I think many people here are admitting, and you have to recognise the value-added that journals provide. There are experiments out there (e.g. post-publication peer review, free-floating editorial boards) trying to challenge the journal model, but I'm not going to presuppose that they're going to be more successful than pay-for OA journals.

So the argument is that:

(a) your taxes went to Nasa, who used them to collect interesting data

(b) other scientists who are not funded by the American taxpayer took that data and turned it into an interesting research paper, which probably took them months of actual work to write, get peer reviewed, and revise

(c) those scientists published their work in a journal which charges for access, which you claim they did for free

(d) part of that process means the journal owns the copyrights now

and therefore, because (a) is true, then you must be morally entitled to that work for free.

If that's the standard, if you went to American public school, and that school taught you to play guitar, does it make it right that all your music can be copied for free?

I think you're missing the part where the scientists that did the months of real work are not paid or funded in any way by NASA.

Should NASA insist that all research done off of it's data be open to the public? That's a different debate.

The point that you're missing is that the money from paying for the paper doesn't go to the scientists or even to the advancement of science, but to the publishing journal. The publishing journal that takes articles without paying authors and can hold their reputation hostage.

(a) Yes.

(b) This is more complicated. Most of those scientists actually are funded by the American taxpayer, through grants, but that is not what I was arguing about. As I explained elsewhere, I was speaking of NASA-affiliated projects, and I noted that the original poster did not appear to distinguish between these and projects in which some researchers had simply used data NASA released publicly. Regardless, all the work the researchers did is irrelevant, because they do not get any of the money from the journal paywall; that all goes to the journal publisher. The work the peer-reviewers did is also irrelevant. Peer review is done by unpaid volunteers, at no expense to the journal publisher. A journal publisher doesn't even have to pay someone to contact peer reviewers, as that work is done by journal editors, who are also unpaid volunteers.

(c) Yes. "They" refers to the scientists. Authors receive no money for journal publication.

(d) Yes. The journal publisher holds the copyright because the scientists signed a document that says so; not because of some general principle. Most journals require copyright assignment before publication.

Nothing here is between me and the scientists. Again, if I have to pay to get that article, the scientists do not get the money; the journal publisher does. There is no question of whether scientists deserve any money because of all their hard work; they don't get any money regardless.

The journal publisher is able to force paid access because of an antiquated arrangement that dates back to the days when journals did bring something to the table: typesetting work and equipment, help in the costly task of dissemination of knowledge, and being an important part of the archiving process. Today they bring only prestige, which matters only because of internal promotion and tenure decisions in the scientists' organizations.

All that has to happen to fix this is for research organizations to insist on free public availability. This benefits everyone except for parasites on the knowledge-dissemination process (journal publishers), who are currently able to extract money due to an outdated system.

Now, whether a private university should require open access to its research publications is something that is up to that organization; I wish they would, but I cannot insist. OTOH, I have no problem demanding that tax-supported granting agencies and tax-supported research organizations make such requirements. The NIH already does. NASA and the NSF and others need to do it too.