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As the article mentioned, in the US, much publicly-funded research already is required to be freely available.

Specifically, anything funded by the NIH-- which means pretty much all biomedical research-- has to end up in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central repository. It's actually the author's responsibility to submit it, but most publishers take care of it for you.

While this model is not without its problems, I think it's a pretty amazing start and has proved itself to be well worth the hassle. The NLM has put into place a great deal of infrastructure to make it easy for authors and publishers to submit their content, and the PubMed Central site itself is a great resource for researchers.

My experience with PubMed is that I almost always only get the abstract and a link to buy the article from the publisher. Sometimes I get a link for the free full text article, but this is a strong minority.

Is this because so many of the listed articles are not funded by the NIH?

I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals.

This is probably true. Whenever I have published articles (I am a mathematician), I have been asked to sign some long agreement which I only skimmed. We have some rights to publish and distribute our work... but not unlimited... something complicated...

In practice, I just put copies of all of my papers on my website where anyone can download them. I have many colleagues who do the same, and many colleagues who are more scrupulous about following the journals' rules. In any case, I don't know of any scholars who have gotten into trouble for distributing their own work.

I work for a university computing service and we sometimes have to deal with copyright takedown demands from academic publishers aimed at the websites of the authors of the papers. It's a disgraceful situation.

What's the advantage over just using the arxiv? A bit better typesetting?

Credibility. Reading a mathematical paper takes a huge amount of effort, and people won't go through that unless there is a high chance to believe the paper is good/correct. Usually this is determined by 1) The author is famous 2) The journal is respected.

This is the same basic problem self-published novels face. There are probably some very good self-published novels, but without someone whose opinion I should trust verifying that they're good, I'm unlikely to a) find out about them and b) if I do find out, read them and decide for myself.

A lot of novels that I turn out to like enormously don't have first chapters that immediately speak to their greatness. But most of the novels I read, I read because an interesting review caught my attention, I've read the writer before, or the book has been recommended by someone who I trust. The first two in my preceding list roughly map to author fame and journal respect.

The ArXiv includes a link to the actual (usually gated) journal article. And the text of that link is the journal name and citation.

My question isn't "why do people submit to journals?" it's "why post the actual PDF from the journal on your webpage (thereby taking a slight risk of getting in trouble) rather than just linking to the ArXiv version?".

Ah, sorry I misunderstood your question.

To answer your actual question, I personally do it because I almost wish the journals would do something nasty to me. Then, I would tell everyone I meet at every conference about that for the next few years and would hasten the decline of the current status-quo.

The arxiv is not refereed. I usually read those pre-prints with (extra) extra caution, especially if they are outside my area of competence.

You should read all legal contracts you enter into. Remember that you can edit a contract, strike out parts, etc. You should get the other party to sign off on it aswell. You could edit the contract to allow you to put your paper on your website. Problem solved.

The problem is you won't get the other party to sign it off.

Yes, you need the other person to agree to the changes. So you send it back to them and ask them to sign it.

In a lot of cases, you can find the pre-print of the paper on arXiv.org (at least that's the case for my field of nuclear and particle physics.) Copyright imposed by journals is an odd beast, since I think few people subscribe to them directly. Mostly, their money comes from academic institutions and unlike consumer-focused organisations like the RIAA, the journals won't usually go after the little guy.

All that being said, the IoP's previously open-access journal JHEP in which my collaboration typically published our papers was bought by Springer last year. I don't know how their open-access policy has been affected by that.

I recently published in JHEP and when I tried to view my paper outside the university I was greeted with a pay wall :(. They wanted the going rate of about £30.

All of my research to date and the work in that paper has been funded by the UK taxpayer. There is something very wrong with that.

There is indeed something very wrong with that. You pay your taxes which help fund research and then you are charged exorbitant prices for access to the resulting articles. At the time I quit maths there were a smaller uprising among some mathematicians trying to break away from the large old, but unfortunately also still prestigious, journals. "Algebraic and Geometric Topology", an online journal, was formed when the entire group of editors on Elsevier's "Topology and its Applications" resigned as a reaction to Elsevier's increasingly whack pricing policies. Later the same happened for the top journal "Topology", the resignation letter is stil linked at John Baez's site: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf.

Likewise books, lecture notes etc. written by lecturers should be made freely available. You want to make money on a book you likely created most of while supposedly doing your paid job? GFY.

You want to make money on a book you likely created most of while supposedly doing your paid job? GFY.

All the academics I know who have written books have done so on their own time, either by taking a sabbatical, going down to part time or during evenings and vacations. Sure the university let them use their office and the university library and stuff, but they didn't directly pay them to write their book.

ha I'm a particle physicist by training :) I was going to add to my comment that in my (ex-) field I'm pretty sure that papers were/are freely available on the CERN websites, as well as arXiv.org.

In my research group (in the School of Computing at Dublin City University), we publish all our papers to our web site and to the university's own research portal (doras.dcu.ie). They are free for anybody to access.

The version we publish is the "camera ready", which is to say the last version we submit for actual publication. It is not, however, the final published version (so, for example, they don't include an Elsevier logo or conference proceedings page numbers). I believe this is legal in our jurisdiction, or at least nobody has called us on it!