Academic publishers run a guarded knowledge economy

"This week George Monbiot won the internet with a Guardian piece on academic publishers. For those who didn't know: academics, funded mostly by the public purse, pay for the production and dissemination of papers; but for historical reasons, these are published by private organisations that charge around $30 (£18.50) per paper, keeping out any reader who doesn't have access through their institution. This is a barrier to the public understanding of science and to ongoing scholarship by people who've wandered away from institutional academia. There are open-access alternatives, where academics pay up-front and the paper is free to all, but these are patchy, and require your funder to pay £1,000 per paper....One major problem with the current publishing model is that it's hard to give access for free to the motivated public, while still gathering income from institutions. My hunch is, at some stage, this problem may be partially sidestepped, when someone manages an illegal workaround that individuals can play with, but which no university could endorse. I may be wrong: but either way, these are very interesting times for information...."