Why don't universities cut out the middleman? | john hawks weblog

"Of course, we all know that the primary "author pays" open access journals, from PLoS and BMC, have much lower costs. Immediately it's obvious that the old-style scholarly publishers are dinosaurs. Who has allowed them to run such high budgets, for a product that can be made on a third or less of the money? ... Setting aside the issue of archive access, one must wonder why a university would pay confiscatory rates for a product that will mostly be on PubMed in a year. The taxpayers got a clue -- they were paying for the research, they should be able to read it. How long will it take universities to realize that they're also paying for the research, so why should they pay to read it? They could save an awful lot of money by cutting out the middleman....The main problem is that authors must surrender their copyright to a cartel of publishers in order to see their scientific work reviewed by peers....Wouldn't it be fairly simple to redirect these resources from journal subscriptions to online production? ..."