Peter has some interesting thoughts on open access publishing:

There’s a big debate within the scientific community in general about how and whether to move away from the conventional model of scientific publishing (journals supported by subscriptions paid by libraries, only available to subscribers) to a model where access to the papers in scientific journals is free to all (”Open Access”). The main problem with this is figuring out how to pay for it. . . .

The CERN task force proposes raising $6-8 million/year over the next few years to start supporting the half of the journals (not including Elsevier ones) that it has identified as ready for Open Access. . . . What is being proposed here is basically to give up on what a lot of people have hoped would develop: a model of free journals, whose cost would be small since they would be all-electronic, small enough to be supported by universities and research grants. Instead the idea here is to keep the current journals and their publishers in place, just changing the funding mechanism from library subscriptions to something else, some form that would fund access for all. . . .

Peter gives some reasons why he doesn’t think this plan will work, and the subsequent discussion has some thoughts about the whole system in which scientists submit articles for free and review papers for free, then publishers make money selling their work. I have more thoughts on this, which I’ll try to organize at some point, but for now let me just say that things in statistics and political science seem a bit better than in physics. Our major journals are organized by the American Statistical Association, Midwest Political Science Association, and so forth, so at least we don’t have to worry so much about the interests of the publishers (which apparently is a big deal lin physics, to judge from Peter’s comments.)

This is important to researchers for (at least) two reasons: (1) the format and availability of publishing affects who sees our work and thus affects the course of future research; (2) those of us who write for refereed journals waste a lot of time tailoring articles to the desires (or the perceived desires) of the referees.