The discussion about stakeholders and open-access publishing is a great one, weighing points pro and con, but I believe that it misses the underlying problem with having organizations formed around the intent to profit from the publishing of scientific research. We, as scientists, must decide if a refereed paper that is locked in a vault is as valuable as one that is not refereed but is accessible to everyone on the internet. It is no wonder that authors who avoided the pay-for-play trap have found their citation numbers increasing dramatically. Search engines could locate the papers and present them to people with an interest, and those people could read them without having to pay. I find it difficult to see how it would go unnoticed that freely available papers would get read more frequently than ones that have to be paid for. But then people are making money on all the papers that are behind closed doors.

Money aside, the real problem from my perspective is that I can no longer find papers at all. The end result of their being locked up by services that want money is that since I don’t have a budget for purchasing papers, I don’t get to read them. That work has become dead to the community. Can the scientific community afford to allow a large portion of its work to be locked away? Will science continue to develop, or will it wither under the oppressive need to generate a revenue stream?