The open access war
This article starts by talking about how Elsevier, a single publisher, had costs the University of California system 11 million dollars a year in subscription fee. It then talks about the current problems in the academic publishing industry. The article talks about how currently certain publishers charge authors fees to publish, not pay peer reviewers, and then charge readers fees to access. In other words, certain publishers are making a high profit with a model that many deem as exploitative. Making it worse, Elsevier owns about 3000 journals, making it difficult to avoid paying them to access or to publish. The article then goes on to talk about the history of academic publishing and how it became this way. Finally the article talks about the high cost to libraries and what scientists are doing in response, such as starting their own open access journals, and increasingly publishing preprint.
Taxpayers spend $140 billion funding science each year — but can't access many of the result
This article talks about the problems with the traditional model of academic publishing. It then gives a history of academic publishing. The article includes a interesting chart of the amount of open access publications by academic discipline. It ends by talking about why the traditional model resists change and the way foreword.
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