Springer Nature has told us everything we need to know about the future of academic publishing: Disintermediation is here – ArcheoThoughts

"Springer Nature’s recent stock initial public offering (IPO) ultimately failed, but it provided the academic community with plenty of information about the company’s and the academic publishing industry’s philosophy, as well as its anxieties. In fact, the prospectus that accompanied the IPO reads like an extended, dire warning about the dangers facing traditional academic publishers and their business model. This may have had something to do with the failure of the IPO. Conversely, the prospectus is a surprisingly tacit acknowledgement of the power of the academy to throw off the yoke of Springer Nature and its competitors. The document is long, but well worth reading for anyone interested in academic publishing. First, the prospectus sounds a cautiously hopeful note that “an industry shift towards the open access model will lead to an increasing number of open access publications, on platforms such as ours, and it will also lead to higher revenues from APCs [Author Processing Charges]” (:S-4). So of course, the goal of open access is not to democratize scholarship and to increase its availability. It is to get higher revenues from APCs. This is not exactly a surprise...."