What's Wrong With Research Communication

"The recent Dagstuhl workshop on the Future of Research Communication has to produce a report. I was one of those tasked with a section of the report entitled What's Wrong With The Current System?, intended to motivate later sections describing future activities aimed at remedying the problems. Below the fold is an expanded version of my draft of the section, not to be attributed to the workshop or any other participant....One major cause [of declining quality] has been that the advent of the Internet, by reducing the cost of distribution, encouraged publishers to switch libraries from subscribing to individual journals to the "big deal", ....Re-publishing an open access version of their scholars' output may seem redundant, but it is essential if the artificial barriers intellectual property restrictions have erected to data-mining and other forms of automated processing are to be overcome....To sum up, the advent of the Internet has greatly reduced the monetary value that can be extracted from academic content. Publishers who have depended on extracting this value face a crisis. The crisis is being delayed only by Universities and research funders. They have the power in their hands to insist on alternative models for access to the results of research, such as self-archiving, but have in most cases been reluctant to do so...."