How Open-Access Journals Pose A Threat To Aging Academic Publications - Enago Blog: Scientific Publication Help

"The Internet is making it easier for open-access journals to mount an assault on the big publishing companies. While these multibillion-dollar industries insist in keeping their profitable model, in which they charge high prices to academic libraries for accessing the content, some open-access promoters have bet on the free knowledge dissemination and thus revolutionized the academic publishing scene. Academic publishing became a private business around the 1960s, when research costs could no longer remain sustainable by public investment and patronage. Publisher houses started charging high prices for subscriptions, only affordable by few wealthy universities and research centers. The two biggest publisher houses—the American Elsevier and the German Springer—are often accused of restricting academic communication and of disloyal competition. Nowadays, technological disruption and the World Wide Web are opening new paths for those who want to place new agents in the academic publishing game ..."