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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Over at Techdirt, Glyn Moody writes briefly about how to stop the large academic publishing houses from completing their attempts at gaining control over the entire publishing process [techdirt.com] from end-to-end.

Techdirt's coverage of open access -- the idea that the fruits of publicly-funded scholarship should be freely available to all -- shows that the results so far have been mixed. On the one hand, many journals have moved to an open access model. On the other, the overall subscription costs for academic institutions have not gone down, and neither have the excessive profit margins of academic publishers. Despite that success in fending off this attempt to re-invent the way academic work is disseminated, publishers want more. In particular, they want more money and more power. In an important new paper, a group of researchers warn that companies now aim to own the entire academic publishing stack: [...]

As it stands, universities stand for the salaries of the faculty members who research, write, and edit the journal articles at no cost to the publishers which then charge exorbitant prices for access to the results.

Previously:
(2020) Open Access Journals Get A Boost From Librarians—Much To Elsevier's Dismay [soylentnews.org]
(2019) University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access [soylentnews.org]
(2019) German Institutions Reach Open Access Deal with Scientific Publisher Wiley [soylentnews.org]
(2018) Elsevier's Demands are Unacceptable to Germany's Academic Community [soylentnews.org]
(2017) List of "Predatory Publishers" Disappears [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission