Particle Physics Bares All, Publishers Blush | Open Equal Free

"The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) announced last week that 90% of particle physics articles will soon be available for free. Publication costs will be covered by a collection of libraries, library consortia, research institutions, and funding agencies, making this a big move towards throwing off the yoke of academic publishing costs. For some time now, the academic world has been quietly frustrated by the costs that surround publishing scientific findings. Earlier this year, Harvard sent a letter to publishers stating 'many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive.' A full 10% of Harvard Library’s acquisition budget goes entirely to journals, 'Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices.' An annual subscription to the chemistry journal Tetrahedron will cost your University $20,269 and Journal of Mathematical Sciences rings up at $20,100. Those are for one institution to access one journal for one year...  where does all this money go?  Well, it turns out those subscription costs serve the invaluable service of making publishers rich. In 2011 the world’s largest publisher of academic journals, Elsevier, made a profit of $1.2 billion off of only $3.38 billion in revenues. That’s pure profit, mind you, not a dime goes to the academics who wrote the material itself... What makes matters worse is that restricting articles actually hurts the researchers who write them. Academics don’t measure their value by counting the zeroes in their bank account but the citations on their CV. High cost of access means fewer readers. Fewer readers means fewer citations. Fewer citations means a smaller CV, not to mention a blockage of knowledge and progress.  SCOAP³ has made a big move for the academic world... The current deal has the money coming from the same places–institutions that would likely be buying access to the articles anyway–but provides it upfront, allowing the articles to be shared openly, for free."