UPDATE: The piece in Nature is not, as I initially thought, a new article. It was already published in 2004, but for reasons only "the no. 1 weekly science journal" knows, it always has today's date attached to it and prominently displayed. While the arguments are thus outdated, they were already wrong in 2004.

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Hot on the heels of confusing science with religion, the journal that calls itself "the no. 1 weekly science journal" (Nature) goes on to embarrass itself with "an independent assessment of the key arguments" surrounding open access. Given that Nature Publishing Group is a stakeholder itself, the independence of anything published there should not be taken for granted. Let's have a look at some of these 'independent arguments':In other words, society doesn't benefit from doctors and patients having access to medical research? That retired professors have access to research? The list goes on, e.g. at whoneedsaccess.org. Clearly, not even close to 90% of those who need access have access to even anything remotely close to 90%. How about some survey data to counter baseless publishers' assertions who has access to how much? See slide 35 of my presentation. I'd challenge the publishers to back their claim up with some data, preferentially not their own surveys, if they have done any.That argument only holds if one follows the baseless assumption that we should keep a journal system based on corporate publishers. Because corporate publishers in scholarly communication have about as much justification for their existence as the Pony Express or the telegraph, all arguments resting on that assumption fall flat. As previously pointed out on this blog and elsewhere, libraries (i.e. the ones paying the publishers) are in a much better position to take over the responsibilities publishers carry today.Really? In times when access to information has become so cheap that newspaper empires are crumbling, universities, many of them publicly funded, should pay more for the commodity everyone else is paying less for? That argument takes some more reasoning than just stating it.
I agree in principle with this argument, although some people might find the way in which these profits are generated obscene:

That argument is so ridiculous, one questions the algebraic competence of the author. According to their own reports, Elsevier has posted profits of 3.918 billion EUR over the last 5 years. The 45m pounds (57m EUR) thus constitute a whopping 1.5% of their adjusted operating profits. Now I'm no economist, so I'd really like to know how 1.5% "balance out the profits"?Again, only if one assumes the Pony Express will keep riding forever.Well, boohoo, what do you think the Pony Express riders or telegraph operators were saying when their end was nigh?  For one, their policy has now changed to somewhat slightly more idiotic. Second, even if it hadn't, their publicly displayed policy is belied by their attempts to prevent such depositing using the generous 'sponsoring' of lawmakers to introduce bills (the RWA) aimed at preventing such repositories from being filled. Finally, the fact that even if they allow such pre-print deposition, they do so only after an embargo period, reveals that the publishers themselves are not confident they deliver anything of value (i.e., worth paying for). If the publishers themselves have no confidence in their own value, why should we pay them?This is such a reversal of fact, it made me lol. Given the very rough estimates of the world-wide academic publishing market with ~12b USD annually in revenue and a fairly accurate estimate of a ~30% profit margin across the main players, there is a potential for 4b USD annual investment in a scholarly communication infrastructure, if libraries would stop spending that money on subscriptions and instead spent the 8b on the publishing costs they'd incur if they published themselves. Compared with the 57m EUR investment by Elsevier, this is roughly a 70-fold increase in investment if universal open access was accomplished by simply cutting out the middlemen.Wait a minute: the fact that we have to go to a gazillion different places to find our literature in this year 2012, instead of using a single smart search tool, is supposed to be some sort of accomplishment? In my presentation on this issue, this example is on one of my first slides where I show just how dysfunctional our publishing system is!I guess this is supposed to say that the publishers are now slowly realizing that they should at least offer their users the technology of the early 1990s or all hell will break lose. Well, I for one am not content with 20 year old technology. I want today's technology to assist me in my job and I'm sick and tired of publishers telling me why I have to wait another 20 years before I can even see a preview of it. Scientists have waited patiently for two decades now for publishers to adopt modern technology. I have to say, my patience is worn out. Maybe others are more patient than me.This is indeed a valid concern learned societies have to face. However, why should the taxpayer care if the learned societies relied on the Pony Express to generate revenue? Should the taxpayer be expected to keep the Pony Express alive only because otherwise the membership fees of those learned societies would have to rise which aren't innovative enough to find other sources of income?Who said Open Access needs to be provided by the Pony Express, when we have the railroad?The economic realities are that the actual costs of scholarly communication today lie somewhere in the ballpark of 8b annually. And the taxpayers are paying an additional 4b every year for something not even the recipients of these 4b can find any reasons for. I'd like to know why we should keep paying these 4b into the pockets of the publishers' shareholders, instead of investing them in something the public actually benefits from, such as a world-wide public library of science (supported by all the ~10k university libraries in the world) that makes not only the scholarly articles, but also the data itself as well as the software to mine, analyze and visualize these data accessible and sustainably archived for all humankind? I have not found a single sentence in this article explaining what the taxpayer receives from being overcharged 4b every single year. Where are the cons of a public library of science that saves the taxpayers of this planet 4b every year?