As far as a scientist’s individual goals, from reading more than a couple things online, it seems as though a scientist’s goal is to get his or her name out there as much as possible. At the Stodden lecture, she was saying how the professor she worked for was one of the most cited professors of all time–because he made his works open. Really it works both ways–dissemination of knowledge and dissemination of name.

Speaking of Steven Salzberg, check it:
http://genefinding.blogspot.com/2007/08/universities-should-support-open-access.html

He makes a good point about how, because of the tendency towards nondisclosure, drug companies and the like funnel all their money into the most profitable drugs instead of the most important drugs–because they can.

What I’m still trying to figure out is if anyone has written any solutions to the peer-review issue. Journals, because they have money, actively recruit scientists to peer review articles. My thinking is that, if the article is open, it is more accessible to be peer reviewed. However, are we also essentially opening it up for any scientist to post an article about anything–science or pseudoscience?

This is probably one of the more famous cases of socially-damaging discovery and patent disputes involving personal and international confrontation.

Professor Steven Salzberg, a Yale grad, makes the case that had a public publishing forum existed back in the ’70′s, there wouldn’t have been such a huge French-American dispute, which many believe slowed the discovery of HIV and set us back many years on fighting the current pandemic. http://genefinding.blogspot.com/2008/10/patent-dispute-costs-robert-gallo-nobel.html

However, I’m skeptical that either Gallo or Montagnier’s teams would have been so quick to publish their findings online for fear of sharing information prematurely and giving the other teams competitive advantages.

Great post. I agree that open-access in science enhances the greater social welfare, improves research efficiency. But beyond the NIH, I’m not sure it’s a great model for all scientific fields. Similarly, I’m doubtful that scientists’ individual incentives are always neatly aligned with A2K, regardless of whether they operate under the government, academia, or private enterprise. For starters, government scientists often deal with a number of sensitive, top-secret subjects, and so governments may wish to conceal certain information as a matter of national security or strategic advantage. But even the researchers themselves are not always as forthcoming, unselfish or egalitarian as we wish them to be. Consider the fact that scientists often make very lucrative post-academic and post-government careers out of their findings in one or two papers, and open access and A2K don’t seem quite so friendly. Oftentimes, governments, universities and private corporations maintain the patents to their researchers’ discoveries if developed under their hood. Thus, a researcher might hope to keep his or her work private until striking out to cash in on his or her own.

Similarly, there are always lots of private-academic, government-academic, and private-public partnerships between universities, NIH-like institutes, and pharmaceutical companies, chem labs, tech companies, etc. Many of these involve contracts that outright preclude disclosure, and so labs and researchers dependent on certain streams of capital might have reasons to conceal the output of their scientists.

Finally labs, be them academic, private or government-funded, are often very clique-ish, exclusive and motivated by prestige. Often scientists, like 7th graders, like to keep secrets, name-call, and do business over 12-person (but no more) conference calls. They try to keep their work private until the final product is ready, thus preferring to confer amongst each other and circulate data, models, algorithms and formulas within a select group of well-trusted, high-pedigree colleagues.

On the other hand, I would expect much less resistance from economists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists and other social scientists. For instance, when emailed by researchers tracking his work from the Dominican Republic, who don’t have funding for JSTOR, a professor of mine is always more than willing to shoot over a copy of his latest paper. In these fields, there is often little immediate material gain to be had just from a single paper on business cycles or property law. In fact, the incentive there is often to accumulate academic capital and then seek tenure, public office, consultation roles or private incorporation. So the advantage of open access is to initiate a dialogue first, and achieve reputability faster. This might explain the lack of resistance to the proposal at Yale Law School and other social science programs.

Ultimately, I do think open access provides collective advantages to science and academia. But as is so often the case, there is work to be done in aligning individual, private and government incentives. Sorry for the winded comment!