Chris Zielinski, UK writes
"they are effectively muzzled."
No, they can place their research in an institutional repository.
"A dilemma: of course, somebody has to pay for the production of academic journals."
But it should not cost thousands of dollars to put an article online. Youtube puts up whole videos for free. Putting up a video is much more involved than putting up an article.
"If it is not the readers or writers, perhaps this is a role for institutions of higher learning?"
Institutions of higher learning may want to run journals. But they should not pay publishers to do it. The amounts being spent on academic journals of commercial publishers are insane. Not paying for neither closed nor open access journals is the only way to make the system more affordable. The funds saved should be used to build/improve institutional repositories.
Now I am the first to agree that current institutional repositories are pretty crappy. But their poor state has to be compared to the amount that was spent on them, compared to the amounts spent on publishers.
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Written by Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel on his 21147th day.
HIFA profile: Thomas Krichel is Founder of the Open Library Society, United States of America. Professional interests: See my homepage at http://openlib.org/home/krichel Email address: krichel AT openlib.org
