So why is the idea that science publishing should be free attributed more intellectual weight than the idea that music should be free, or movies, or software? I mean, we get it, everybody loves free stuff.
A significant proportion of science research is funded by non-governmental organisations - for example the Gates Foundation.
Furthermore, most universities will charge the researchers who receive grants a cost known as 'overhead' that can often be 100% of the grant. Typically, the funding agencies pay for this separately.
When it comes to basic science, this is not true at all. Gleaning numbers from Wikipedia, the Gates Foundation seems to spend roughly $300 million a year on research. HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) spends $450 million a year. In contrast, the NIH spend $31 billion a year. Biology and medicine are the fields with the highest proportion of private funding, and even in these fields the government is dominant.
Overhead is relevant as it shows that even at 'public' universities, the funding agency must pay for the research to be carried out, countering arguments about the public paying for research.
Where it gets quantitative, the Wikipedia page seems to be talking about "R&D" in general, which is an accounting category that is much broader than "research". When Intel designs a new CPU or Boeing designs a new plane, for example, that's under the "research and development" rubric in these figures. But they typically don't publish much about it, and a lot of what they're doing doesn't have much to do with the kind of "research" we're talking about here.
Perhaps more relevant, though, very little research indeed is funded by subscription fees to scientific journals or conference proceedings or sales prices of academic books; journal and conference authors don't even get royalties, and neither do their institutions, and very few academic books make a substantial amount of money.
I don't understand why overhead is relevant; we're arguing about who the funding agency is, not how grants are structured. If the NIH has to spend 40% of their dollars on overhead so that their PIs have offices and library access, and so does the HHMI, how does knowing this allow us to more accurately compare the expenditures of the NIH and HHMI?
Ask a university or a library if they are the same thing as a music label or a film studio. They'll give you a list as long as your arm of the differences.
I'm so sick of people complaining about the IEEE and the ACM. The IEEE is not the Syrian government. If you think you have a simple solution for this problem, nobody will shoot you if you offer your candidacy for president or whatever.
Part of the solution is precisely to loudly complain about them. Actually, if we want most scientists to not bow to IEEE's terms (which will solve the problem), loud complaints are probably the best one can do.
So, here is my loud complaint: I hereby declare that I find this policy by IEEE outrageous, and that we should boycott them until they change.
Many scientists can't be bothered to put their papers online once they get tenure. The system right now gets university libraries to pay journal publishers to publish papers. Taking away the profit motive from this system can be a nice social experiment. Maybe we'll end up living in some kind of a socialist paradise where everyone gets the papers they want for free.
I never said it can't ever work in practice. Either it will or it won't. But then again, I'm not the one who's calling to abolish a working system that has served science for decades.
There is a small detail however that probably warrants the abolition of this "working system that has served science for decades": thanks to the Internet, distribution costs are kinda non-existent now.
And I tend to think that, where sharing costs you nothing, the socialist dream is quite possible.
