This renowned mathematician is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing - Vox

"Timothy Gowers's first big assault on academic publishing started almost by accident. In 2012, the Cambridge mathematician took to his blog to write a post bemoaning the exorbitant prices that journals charge for access to research. Gowers vowed to stop sending his papers to any journal from the world's largest academic publisher, Elsevier.  To his surprise, the post went viral — and spurred a worldwide boycott of Elsevier, which publishes 2,000 journals that can cost up to 10 or 20 thousand dollars a year for a subscription. Within days, hundreds of researchers left comments commiserating with Gowers, a winner of the prestigious Fields Medal. They were upset that prohibitive prices meant much of their research was out of reach, and that the current state of affairs slowed the spread of knowledge. One reader even set up a website, The Cost of Knowledge, to organize the boycott. More than 15,000 researchers have joined the protest since.  But in the four years that have passed, little has changed. Despite a decades-old 'open access' movement — which aims to put research findings in the public domain instead of languishing behind expensive paywalls — the traditional approach to publishing remains firmly entrenched.  So Gowers is now launching his second attack, this time with a lot more intention.  This week, he debuted a new online mathematics journal called Discrete Analysis. The nonprofit venture is owned and published by a team of scholars. With no publisher middlemen, access will be completely free for all ..."