How Open Access is Changing Scholarly Publishing — Cenveo Publisher Services

"Transparency, openness, and integrity all come at a cost, however. For many years, that cost was met by charging journal subscription fees—usually borne by institutions who either produced the research, benefited from it, or both. So long as the publishing model was solely print-based, the subscription model worked well, especially for institutions with deep pockets. That all changed with the Internet. Not only did the scope and volume of research increase rapidly, so did the perception that all information should be easily findable via search engines.

The Internet expanded the audience for research outside traditional institutions—to literally anyone with a connected device. With this expansion, the disparity between the well-funded and those less fortunate became acute. As it did with other publishing workflows, this disruption drove a need for new economic models for scholarly publishing."