Soaring Prices Spur a Revolt in Scientific Publishing - The New York Times

"Esoteric and highly technical, scientific journals have never been viewed as a hot publication market. In recent years, however, scientific journals have become big business, with large commercial publishers entering a scene once dominated by nonprofit scientific societies whose only goal was to disseminate scientific information. It is a change that many academics say has sent prices skyrocketing -- with some journals now costing libraries more than $15,000 a year.

But scientists, whose universities are often unable to afford the very journals to which they are giving their research findings, are now teaming up with irate librarians to fight back. They are creating their own journals to compete with expensive commercial publications, and offering them at one-half to one-twentieth the price.

Fomenting this revolution is Sparc, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a group of more than 100 major research libraries helping these rebel journals get established by committing to buy them...."