I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I think all your points are accurate (with the exception of all peer-review being good - some journals really do have bad

I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I think all your points are accurate (with the exception of all peer-review being good - some journals really do have bad peer-review). The life sciences would be a better place if everything was open-access. My point is that there is zero incentive for those "in the power" to change. Scientists just want to keep running on the prestige hamster wheel, journals want to get money, universities pay the money because their scientists need the journals. To break the cycle you need someone to get off the wheel first. Journals obviously won't. Universities can't (imagine a university cutting all of their scientists off from the data....). Government doesn't really play a role in this, they just hand out grant money. And they do require data to be open-access after a certain period of time if funded through the NIH. So that leaves scientists. And very few are willing to stake their employment, livelihood and reputation on a "cause". The only people who realistically can do that are tenured faculty - and most of these are old PIs that like the system just the way it is, damnit. So yeah, I agree with you. But I don't see it changing any time soon. Where is the incentive? Edit: As an aside, you can lease the Medline abstract database from the NIH for free (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/license/license.html http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/license/license.html). You can also dowload Biomed Central full text archive too (http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/datamining http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/datamining)