The Parachute: They’re changing a clause, and even some laws, yet everything stays the way it was.

... “Take the Elsevier Science boycott... As many a boycott does, this one, too, is likely to result in ‘changing a clause, changing some laws, yet everything staying the way it was’... No, publishers’ role is not to ‘publish’; it is to feed the need of the scientific ego-system for public approbation, and of its officialdom for proxies for validation and scientific prowess assessment in order to make their decisions about tenure, promotion and grants easier and swifter... look at what happens in physics... a good portion of articles in arXiv – quite possibly the majority... are subsequently submitted to journals and formally ‘published’ ... Clearly, officialdom in physics is prepared to pay, to the tune of thousands of dollars per article, for the organization of the peer review ritual and the acquisition of impact factor ‘tags’ that come with formal publication of a ‘version of record’. So be it. If officialdom perceives these things as necessary and is willing to pay, ‘publishers’ are of course happy to provide them. But one of the biggest problems in science communication, the free flow of information, seems to have been solved in physics, as arXiv is completely open. If arXiv-like platforms were to exist in other disciplines as well, and if a cultural expectation were to emerge that papers be posted on those platforms before submission to journals, and their posting be accepted as a priority claim, we would have achieved free flow of information in those other areas as well. I suspect that the essence of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) is about achieving a situation like the one that exists in physics with arXiv... Given that arXiv has done no discernable damage to publishers... pushing for the Research Works Act (RWA) instead of making the case for extending an arXiv-like ‘preprint’ system to disciplines beyond physics seems an extraordinary lapse of good judgement... the concern that publishers have about the academic community not being willing for long to pay the sort of money they now do for what is little more than feeding the officialdom monster, is a realistic concern... Personally, I think open arXiv-like set-ups in disciplines other than physics are the way forward. Publishers should – and truly forward-looking ones may – establish those themselves, if they don’t want to be reduced to an afterthought in the scientific communication game.”