Vanity Depressing
The Research Works Act (RWA) is a sad and shameful moment in American History. It will be viewed as dirty greed freaks slapping a price tag on moving history forward. It might be a necessary stage in human progress to shoot these fools out of cannon as traitors to our species, ratiocination, and goddamn common sense.
How can any reasonable human being argue for keeping taxpayer-funded research from taxpayers? How can one in all seriousness defend it?
Worse yet are the all the professors high in the ivory tower of scholasticism fearing that their grad students might hand over research to a filthy Open Access (OA) journal. My god, no majesty, pomp, and or circumstance, just open like some kind of info slut. Who in their right mind would want publish in the public bathroom of journals instead of the country club?
In that moment snobbery comes forth like a rushing sewer and drowns rationality. The hierarchy of journals is nice and established, and without it, you do not know your place. Fancy journals are where you can get the right to swell like a toad with pride. That is where you get your bragging rights and claim the right to be the cock of the walk. I will grant you that there is benefit in fancy journals, but it is superficial, the scientists do the real work. 
Open Access does something horrible for the indoctrinated; it removes the crutch of a hierarchy by removing the glamour. Worse, it removes the veneer of science. Science is a career like a real job and there was supposed to be a bigger point to it all.
Publish or perish, but must you make the publisher rich at the expense of stifling your own research? Of aiding in the exploitation of university libraries? Must you still play that game in the face of options? In the face of a growing consensus that it is starting to look like a moral question?
Scientific articles are not published for profit like novels, they are not written to become a best in show in some field of study. They are written to ever so carefully expand the small bubble we call human knowledge with certitude. It takes dedication to scientific methodology, painstaking research, critical review by peers and a whole lot of frustrating days and nights that will never be gotten back. The reason for the pain and the effort is make that bubble of human knowledge bigger.
The sin of academic publishing might be greed but the sin of some scientist is vanity.
