I was at an APA conference in DC not long ago, and a lot of the exhibitors were book companies that publish academic series, textbooks, reference material, etc. One was Springer (probably the largest publisher of scientific journals, monographs, textbooks, volumes, etc., around), and one of the new books was Is Science Compatible with Free Will? It was, alas, outside of my price range, but luckily Springer has begun to include its books within its online database and I have access (although downloading a chapter at a time is annoying and I hate not being able to hold what I'm reading). I was primarily interested because one chapter/paper was by Gisin, the physicist who published the first test of nonlocal correlations at extreme distances (Aspect being the first to test it at all). He's "a name" in physics. He also believes that science is compatible. So does Penrose (an atheist) and Stapp (not sure about his religious views but he critiques Eccles's theory because it "brings in a kind of 'soul'").
But this isn't the only over-priced volume written by and (usually) for specialists. In 2010, Oxford University Press (OUP) put out Free Will and Consciousness, a volume with papers by PhDs from MIT, Cornell, Berkeley (that was Searle), etc. 2 years before that the same OUP put out Are We Free? with papers mostly from cognitive psychologists from some of the top cog. sci. centers in the world.
Actually, it wasn't even the first volume put out recently by Springer. In 2009, Springer's series Springer Complexity (which includes at least one monograph/volume series and some journals) put out Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will. It wasn't great, but at least one of the contributors is on the editorial board for Advances in Consciousness Research (alongside such notables as David Chalmers, Searle, Ray Jackendoff, and others whom those who keep up on these things would likely recognize). It's a volume/monograph series (akin to a peer-reviewed journal, but as these can only feature paper-length studies editorial boards also put out series), and it regularly gets into the how's, what's, and why's, of consciousness and free will.
Chalmers' is also on the editorial board of the series Philosophy of Mind, which published Hodgson's Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will (I'm not sure if the equation is correct, but the publishing company was again OUP) as well as Beyond Reduction and other pro-free will monographs.
Then there are the individual volumes or monographs by academic publishing companies that are behind e.g., Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem (MIT Press), The Mechanical Mind (Routledge), the volume Being Reduced (OUP), Did my Neurons Make me Do It? (OUP), the volume Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? (MIT press), the numerous books and volumes with papers written by physicists, neuroscientists, and MDs, etc., that are published in Springer's series The Frontiers Collection, one of which (Stapp's 3rd edition of Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics) containing material going back to a journal paper he wrote on the Copenhagen interpretation in the 70s I believe, and that's just some of the books I happen to own. I'm sick of listing them and they pale in comparison to what is out there and even that has nothing on the number of peer-reviewed studies dealing with consciousness and free will.
Basically, I wouldn't write it off so quickly.
