A Fistful Of Dollars: Why Corporate Publishers Have No Place In Scholarly Communication

"With roughly four billion US$ in profit every year, the corporate scholarly publishing industry is a lucrative business. One of the largest of these publishers is Anglo-Dutch Elsevier, part of Reed Elsevier. According to their website, their mission is to "publish trusted, leading-edge Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) information – pushing the frontiers and fueling a continuous cycle of exploration, discovery and application." However, Elsevier recently admitted to publishing a set of six fake journals, aimed to promote medical products and drugs by the company Merck, but with the appearance of peer-reviewed, scholarly literature. Clearly, trust is not Elsevier's top priority. What is Elsevier's top priority, though, is making money.... With hardly any labor costs to speak of and great value provided from outside for free by tax-funded researchers, it is not surprising hat corporate publishers sport great profit margins: Elsevier...36%; Springer’s Science + Business Media...33.9%; John Wiley & Sons...42%; Informa.plc...32.4%....[W]ith low costs and an ever increasing stream of tax funds burning holes in your pocket, you wonder how all the money could be invested to protect your shareholder value for the future. Therefore, commercial publishers: [1] Buy access to elected representatives, [2] Use this access to lobby for protective legislation, [3] Pay full-time employees for government lobbying, [4] Support SOPA, [5] Discredit Open Access by hiring professional 'pit-bull' campaigners, [5] Lobby against Open Access at the US White House...."