Scholarly licence to print money

"WHO pays the piper in scholarly publishing is a very hot global topic....Scholarly publishing, especially for the six or seven huge multi-national journal publishers, is one of the most lucrative global businesses. US based Simba Information reported on January 6 that, "Amid budgetary pressures and a slow economic recovery, the combined markets for science, technical and medical (STM) publishing grew 3.4 per cent to $US21.1 billion ($20bn) in 2011". The Economist reported last year that Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals, made pound stg. 724m ($1.069 billion) in 2010 on revenues of pound stg. 2bn - an operating-profit margin of 36 per cent....Figures for other major publishers in 2010 or early 2011 are similar: Springer's Science+Business Media, pound stg. 294m on revenue of pound stg. 866m - 33.9 per cent; John Wiley $106m on revenue of $253m - 42 per cent; and the Academic division of Informa, pound stg. 47m on revenue of pound stg. 145m - 32.4 per cent....The academic community, supported through the salaries and infrastructure of the institutions, gives away its scholarly content to commercial publishers. Peer reviewing of millions of articles is then undertaken, almost totally without charge, by that same academic community. The publishers then impose restrictive copyright regulations on the scholarly content, which they then sell back at ever increasing profit margins to universities which originally created the material. Logical? ..."