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The New York Times has an opinion piece about Open Access publishing. It starts with the case of Alexandra Elbakyan a guerilla open access activist who is on the lam from the US government acting on behalf of the copyright cartel. Pricing and other restrictions put many journals out of reach of all but the few researchers at major, well-funded universities in developed nations. The large publishing companies usually have profit margins over 30% and subscription prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care, which itself is priced insanely, over the past two decades, so there appears to be a real scandal there. Several options are available including pre-print repositories and various open access journals. The latter require the author to pay up front for publishing. However, the real onus lies on the communities' leaders, like heads of institutions and presidents of universities, who are in a position to change which journals are perceived as high-impact.
Edit: Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub in 2011.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 15 2016, @06:03AM
Obviously it is because paper is a vastly inferior medium to digital methods. It is far more costly, and much more limited. Paper simply isn't searchable and copyable like digital data is, taking many orders of magnitude more time to do. Paper really is obsolete for delivery of news.
The tragedy is that publishers have not responded to this reality in a constructive fashion. Instead they have been extremely reactionary. They don't believe they can earn a living in a digital world, and instead of listening to evidence that they can, they've enshrined copyright as the one and only means to flourish. They play upon public sympathy, inertia, nostalgia, and even the whiff of wealth in a meritocratic possibility that anyone could get published if only their work is good enough, and then they too could become wealthy off of copyright. When that hasn't worked, they've resorted to the desperation measures of propaganda, force, and fear.
They ask way too much of us when they want everyone to go on acting as if the Internet does not exist, and keep buying books and audio CDs. The "problem" of piracy is best resolved by admitting it is not an immoral, reprehensible activity that causes artists to starve, it is instead a natural right, and should be fully legalized.