Related to the idea of a "freedom zone" is that of a university "bubble," where the institution's endowment and funding allows the needs and interests of research to ignore what's beyond its walls. But while scientists may want to publish in Nature so they can get offered good faculty positions, and while the bubble may make it easy for them to exercise freedom in research, I think a lot of them are seeing and believing in the benefits of open publications, if not yet open data. The success of the arxiv and PLoS as well as the NIH's new rule of delayed public paper release are exemplary of the trend toward open academic publications.