Are Library Vendors a Necessary Evil? – Academic libraries and open access – Medium

"When a public institution outsources the production and provision of goods or services to an external enterprise — whether it be the federal government buying missiles from a commercial defense contractor or a library paying for online access from scholarly societies and software licenses from for-profit vendors — it’s easy to end up with prices marked up like in a hotel mini-bar, as evidenced by a $435 hammer or a $507,000 subscription to a few dozen chemistry journals. We can move in a better direction, through policy and practice, with advocacy and support for open access publications, open textbooks, open education resources, institutional repositories, and free or open source software...."