Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? | Science | The Guardian

"Scientists are well aware that they seem to be getting a bad deal. The publishing business is 'perverse and needless', the Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen wrote in a 2003 article for the Guardian, declaring that it 'should be a public scandal'. Adrian Sutton, a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists 'are all slaves to publishers. What other industry receives its raw materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry out the quality control of those materials, and then sells the same materials back to the customers at a vastly inflated price?' (A representative of RELX Group, the official name of Elsevier since 2015, told me that it and other publishers 'serve the research community by doing things that they need that they either cannot, or do not do on their own, and charge a fair price for that service'.)"