Apr 14th 2012 | from the print edition
PUBLISHING obscure academic journals is that rare thing in the
media industry: a licence to print money. An annual subscription
to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will
cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set
you back $20,100. In 2011 Elsevier, the biggest academic-journal
publisher, made a profit of £768m ($1.2 billion) on revenues of
£2.1 billion. Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible
because the journals’ content is largely provided free by
researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are
usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very
universities that provide the free content and labour. For
publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and
taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to
read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers
education and research.
[...]
Continua qui: http://www.economist.com/node/21552574