the more I read your material, the more disgusted i become. it is time to throw this back in the face of the OA advocates: don’t tell me why we MUST give our work away for free and why we MUST stop publishing in journals that work just fine and (in my field at least) cost very little money. instead, tell me what the incredible social benefit is that OA is supposed to grant, because I don’t get it. If you want to be a doctor, you have to go to medical school. If you go to medical school, you get access to journals. If you don’t want to become a doctor, why does society owe you access to doctors’ writings MORE than it owes to the people who have devoted their lives to medicine? Are non-doctors really going to start contributing droves of real medical research that doctors can’t do, and that non-doctors could not do by going to the library? And their right to do that trumps the right of academics to determine their own system of promotion, review, and assessment? Who said so? Why?
More and more, I think OA is showing its true colors, which is not just antithetical but actually hostile to the academic enterprise and to academic freedom.