We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free.
As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced, not that the prices should be zero, as you somehow concluded.
"Go publish it on your blog."
See, I've actually done that. I can tell you what happens. A large subset of people don't believe something has been published unless it's in the scientific literature. People end up writing papers which say things like "the first comparison between X and Y". I write to them pointing out several previous blog publications which report the analysis, to be told that they knew about one of them, but didn't consider it sufficiently academic to count as a real publication.
Publishers make their profits because a lot of people, including those who hire or fund academics, believe that a publisher's imprimatur is essential to being a publication.
This is not completely invalid. Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals.
So if you publish on your blog, it's not likely that people will know about your work.
If you want to advance career in science that has a strong academic orientation, then it's very hard to do so by only publishing blog posts.
Therefore, if you don't like it, change the system. Which is what this debate has been about for the last 15+ years.
Just a remark: actually Google Scholar indexes everything that resembles a publication. For instance it indexes PDF linked from the "research" page of my personal website: if you search for "rauzy ARMv7-M" for instance [1] you'll find a preprint paper that is publicly only available on that web page.
"resembles a publication" is an interesting concept, though point taken that it indexes more than just articles published in a journal.
One paper I'm thinking of compared implementations of two different algorithms, and showed that for chemical data VF2 was several times faster than the Ullman algorithm for subgraph isomorphism. A couple of years earlier, two of the free software projects in the field did the same analysis, with the same conclusion. Both published their results on their respective blogs/wiki, and changed the internals to use VF2.
These don't resemble a publication in a way that Google Scholar can discern.
It's a bit annoying to me in that the scientific literature is supposed to be "self-correcting", in the sense that I could publish a followup paper highlighting some of the pre-history. But the journal I'm thinking of is an OA journal, with no letters to the editor or similar section. The only way to update the literature is to pay ~$1,000 for a full-sized paper, or convince some other journal (... or arxiv? Hmm...) to publish a correction piece.
> Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals.
Google scholar seems to index arxiv.org (a free for readers and authors, no review paper archive). Would you consider publishing those things you've published as blog posts there too?
I have considered it. However, I work in cheminformatics, which doesn't really fall under "Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics". I don't see an appropriate place for my work.
For example, under Quantitative Biology you'll notice a lack of pharmaceutical chemistry, toxicology, or pesticides, which are closely related areas to the types of work I do.
Searching out of curiosity, I found http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1724 as an example of something in my field. It's under the catch-all "Computer Science > Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science", so that's a possibility.
There is some toxicology under metabolomics, but that focused on expression data, not structure-based prediction. There's another tox paper filed under "Mathematics > Statistics Theory", again based on gene expressions.
There's no history of people using arxiv.org in my field. If people don't like to cite blog publications, I don't know if they would like to cite preprints. Something to find out the hard, slow way, I guess.
We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free.
As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced, not that the prices should be zero, as you somehow concluded.
"Go publish it on your blog."
See, I've actually done that. I can tell you what happens. A large subset of people don't believe something has been published unless it's in the scientific literature. People end up writing papers which say things like "the first comparison between X and Y". I write to them pointing out several previous blog publications which report the analysis, to be told that they knew about one of them, but didn't consider it sufficiently academic to count as a real publication.
Publishers make their profits because a lot of people, including those who hire or fund academics, believe that a publisher's imprimatur is essential to being a publication.
This is not completely invalid. Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals.
So if you publish on your blog, it's not likely that people will know about your work.
If you want to advance career in science that has a strong academic orientation, then it's very hard to do so by only publishing blog posts.
Therefore, if you don't like it, change the system. Which is what this debate has been about for the last 15+ years.