Scientific publication as narcissism? Or is it lack of responsibility?

Dan Cohen is hacking the academy in a week (#hackacad). In his pursuit he talks about open access publishing and scholarly values. There appears to be an attitude problem among scientists: they increasingly use Googlebooks and other publicly available digital sources as jump off point for their research. However, when it comes to publishing their results, they opt for the traditional journal. Sharing will be done only after the finished product has been published and resulted in a new line on their CV.

Of course, this has much to do with academic funding and subsequent publication rules. All fair enough. But Cohen wants us to share work in progress. Weblogs, tweets, wikis...

Stephen Ramsay responds to Cohen's post by stating that scientists don't have time to read other's work. Therefore the judgement of value is outsourced to publishers. They will value the quality of research. In return you hand them over copyrights...

Honestly, I think our goal as a community should be to present our colleagues with as many inscrutable objects as possible. We should be making lots of videos, podcasts, maps, "books" with a hundred authors, blog posts, software, and web sites without any clear authorial control. And yes, we should put open content licenses on all of it and give it away to everyone we meet. And then we should dare our colleagues to tell us that our work isn't of sufficient intellectual quality.