The British commentator George Monbiot once compared academic publishers to the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, concluding that the former were more predatory.
"The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws," he wrote. "Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."
Despite a decades-old "open access" movement — to have all research findings in the public domain and not languishing behind paywalls — the traditional approach to publishing remains firmly in place. Taxpayers fund a lot of the science that gets done, academics (many of whom are also funded by public money) peer review it for free, and then journals charge users (again, many of whom paid for the science in the first place!) ludicrous sums of money to view the finished product.
American universities and government groups spend $10-billion each year to access the science. That's ten billion dollars to buy back content we have often already paid for in the first place. We may shell out for Murdoch's news services, too, but the fees are more affordable, Murdoch's empire...