All research should be made available to everyone. That is what I mean. They shouldnt be hidden behind fees. There is also a lot of medical research (That doesnt affect patents or products) that isnt released.
I can see why there is a need for stuff not to be released until its done (And from what I can tell from where the Mrs works - until they can fabricate the results to get their drugs approved!), but once its done - public domain. I think things would come along a lot more quickly that way.
From my understanding though a lot of the fees for the journals goes back into science in the form of grants and funding. Cut out the fees and the science will suffer. The journals with the highest fees tend to be the more prestigious in the field. The fees are high because they only publish the best quality work, as a result the scientists aiming to get published in them strive to produce quality work to get in. If everything was free Id imagine the editorial/review standards could slip on the basis of there being less incentive to cherry pick the papers?
Id also say that when Ive been doing literature reviews, maybe 25% of the papers Ive come across that Ive needed to read have been freely available in the public domain. Its not much I admit, but its something. In general the other papers are accessible one way or another if the person really wants to read them, and 99% of the time the abstract is available which will give you the skeleton of the paper anyway.
As to research that isnt released, Id agree that it should be if it is actually important (such as research that shows drug x can cause undesirable side effects). I dont think research not being released is down to the academics though, all the ones I know would want ANY findings they have made publicy available, the blame almost always falls to the people paying the bills, so in medical terms its the pharma company, not the researchers at fault, and in other cases usually the client funding the research. There is a difference IMHO between academic research and commercial research.
I would add that getting work published increases a teams visibility and increases their likelihood of getting grants in the future. Letting through a duff or even faked piece of work lowers the standing of the team who produce it when found out but also that of the publisher and those vetting the article.
As for medical research a lot is hidden to try to prevent issues with drugs becoming apparent and prevent other companies benefiting from the original companys work. There have been several instances recently that show the lengths that companies will go to to avoid issues with their drugs becoming known. If a company gets say ten results back from outside organisations as to the efficacy of a new drug but 3 of them are negative they might remove those results from the total and thus increase the apparent benefit. No-one outside the drug company and its testers would be aware of the discarded data so their being caught doing this is relatively low.
