When it comes down to it, if your toilet is plugged up, wouldn’t you value a plumber more than a rock star? Bottom line – if you don’t want to pay, nobody’s making you play. Just stop bitching unless you’re willing to work for nothing.

First, I was addressing the general idea of “not paying for knowledge”, not this particular instance. Second, the authors have pointed out that one can read about their academic research free of charge, elsewhere. Third, there have certainly been times and places where the private sector funded academic research.

Now imagine if scientists united and held back their work, the contents of their brains only passing in secret among themselves. What if the rest of the world went without the benefits of scientific endeavor? What if there were no new articles to publish, no new textbooks, no teaching younger generations, no advancements in medicine and computer technology, no nanoscience, no new discoveries… that is, except for scientists who were the only one to enjoy the benefits of their own hard work.

Wait, this might make a good novel… nevermind…

Clear skies, Alan

Some academic work might suffer, but not all. I remember once reading the “Reports from the Observatories” in the sadly defunct and sorely missed Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. When checking out Sussex, there were something like a dozen single-author papers by John D. Barrow in one year, all in prestigious journals (and he was author on other papers as well). In the same year, he wrote a couple of popular books. I asked someone who worked in Sussex at the time what his hours were, and he replied “pretty much 9 to 5″. I don’t know if he wrote the popular books during working hours or not.

The distribution costs are not that relevant. The idea is paying to the creator of the information.

They were already paid when they received their weekly paychecks. Academic research is a public patronage and always has been. Private interests should not be involved.

The distribution costs are not that relevant. The idea is paying to the creator of the information. In the past, coupling this with distribution costs was a means to an end. Unfortunately, idiots like RMS haven’t understood this basic fact and accuse people who actually want to get paid for creative work (like writing software) of being some sort of fascists. Ditto for the internet pirates and so on. (I think the name is well chosen: “disagree with me and I’ll kill you” is their favourite mode of argumentation.)

Still I think there is one point that needs mentioning: We don’t make a living writing (popular) science articles. (BTW the same goes for writing textbooks where the problem is in fact amplified.) We have well paying jobs at universities so we are not dependent on a few extra bucks from publishers. As Mark says, judging on the hours that writing (and doing research for it before) takes the hourly pay is in fact ridiculous. We are writing in our free time (or as part of our time budget that is already paid for by our salaries).

I think one provides a great service to the community if one offers excellent text free to access. I would like to applaud the likes of David Tong who’s first class lecture notes on string theory I am currently using in my string theory class. It’s just wonderful to be able to tell the students the text for the course is freely available rather than them having to pay a publisher who cashes in (rather than the author in fact) for gatekeeping the content provided by scientists for very little compensation.

The comment about artwork etc is of course valid.

1) Just for the record, authors get paid a trivial amount for an article in Scientific American – just a small honorarium. The money goes into, among other things, paying for the wonderful artwork and editorial help we got. And I think that should be paid for. No scientist would ever write an article like this for the money.

2) This is not a research paper reporting on the results of my publicly-funded research. Any one of you can go and read those for free. for example, some relevant to the SciAm article are

http://arXiv.org/abs/0808.1105

http://arXiv.org/abs/0709.1128

I don’t hear complaints when people write popular books about science, and this is like a very small version of that.

3) You may not have noticed, but I, and others on this site, actually do an awful lot of free public science education. this includes some of the posts written here, public lectures, science cafes, panel discussions and speaking at schools. It is also worth pointing out that we do not need to do anything like this amount of work, and, without criticizing them, note that most scientists do none of it. I’m not looking for a pat on the back – merely to balance some of the nonsense above.

4) As far as reaching an audience, I don’t have much to say about the eventual structure of the distribution of knowledge in society, but one thing is entirely clear. The way things run today, this one article is likely to reach many more people who are interested in science than anything I could post for free anywhere. Most certainly it will reach some new people who have not read other things I have done. And at the end of the day, by the way, this is why people write for Scientific American. The idea that one should feel bad about this is, frankly, ridiculous.