I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall guys. Something much more important is going on.
It isn't true that the US government could easily bypass the publishers. They want the research to be distributed, and peer reviewed, and have historically relied on the publishers to do that. The NIH (the federal agency that dispenses the bulk of academic funding in the US) took the view that they could get better distribution terms on behalf of the US public, with their open access mandate in 2008. It's this policy that the journal publishers are trying to reverse. Distribution, and peer review, are evolving, but they haven't evolved to the point where the US government could easily bypass the publishers.
I understand where you are coming from and I see your point. However, I'm not saying it would be "easy" just "relatively easy", as compared to the work and cost involved in legislation, investigation, and enforcement of the act which has been proposed.
Setting up a new system would not be without hurdles, of course, however if the initiative is properly funded and is pushed from the cabinet-level (i.e. US DOE) down and the use of the new system is tied to federal funding for universities, then it will gain traction and prestige.
It might take a generation for the old guard to fall away but eventually we'd have a better, more transparent, fairer system.
So your argument is "there must be some deep conspiracy which I cannot explain yet I will suggest with ominous tones, so let's do nothing." Classic muddying the waters.
"Conspiracy"? I don't recall saying that. But if we take the literal definition of the root word (conspire) then every legislative act would fall into that far too broad category.
Conspiracy theory aside, you have to realize that no law ever gets passed, or even makes it to a full vote, unless multiple parties are successfully convinced that they, their constituents, and their campaign contributors will benefit from the proposed bill.
No muddying of the waters intended. And you're right, I don't know exactly what the real motivations behind this are - however I am sure that there is more than simply the profit margins of publishers at stake here.
1 -- I don't see what you're trying to imply, could you come out and say it?
2 -- Actually, the publishers do have a lot of power. The universities are stuck in a bad equilibrium (in the game theory sense) -- if any of them individually deviates (by not subscribing to popular/restrictive journals and not publishing in them), that university is going to be the one to get hurt.
The only way out for universities is if they all cooperate and decide to ditch the restrictive journals. There are movements toward this right now (against Elsevier, for instance), but it's very difficult to gain traction. You can't just pick up the red phone to every university president and say, "hey guys, stop publishing in these journals, I set up a whole different process over here!" The journals have the prestige, so they have the power for now.
Response to #1: I don't know any more about it than you do, with any degree of certitude. But I do know there's more at stake than protecting publishers.
Response to #2: Good points. But don't forget that the government has the "Power of the Purse". If they tie funding to open access to papers, then some amazing things will start to happen.
The major non-governmental funding agencies recently banded together to solve the problem roughly the way you suggest, by creating their own open-access journal which they will enourage their grantees to submit their work to. It will be called eLife:
It would probably be considered dubious/anti-competitive if NIH and NSF launched their own journals, but because of the Open Access Initiative (which RWA attempts to reverse), NIH is able to host articles that have already been released to the public via PubMed Central.
While the public does have an interest in research becoming public after a reasonable period of time, I think the government is going to have a hard time declaring that it wants to unilaterally sidestep a multibillion dollar industry that is crucial to science as it is practiced today, and an even harder time getting scientists to accept whatever solution it comes up with, since publishing in high quality, peer-reviewed journals is key to job advancement in most of academia.
Online publishing has only recently (in terms of university and government policy) become viable. There's still no real killer platforms, though there are a few good niche ones.
The universities and government are looking to ditch the journals, and the journals know it. But it's a slow process.
