Tax payers here and elsewhere are being gipped by publishers who claim copyrights to the scientific literature.
As an example, this article in Cell was supported by several grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 AG034504, R01 AG030146, P30 AG10161, R01 AG17917, R01 AG15819, K08 AG034290, P30 AG10161, R01 AG11101, and NS032765), and the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Somehow, Cell thinks we should pay 31.50 for viewing 13 pages of the reprint!
This is becoming endemic in academic publishing. Enough is enough! It’s time for academics to figure out a way to break the commercial publishers’ monopoly over the circulation of peer-reviewed scientific literature. There must be another way of circulating academic work.
They do not have a legal monopoly. There are excellent journals that do not behave this way. The monopoly occurs because they “own” prestige and charge for bestowing it. Harold Varmus, former NOH head tried valiantly to force a change and succeeded partially. All NIH funded work eventually gets in the public domain.
I prefer a mechanism where all papers , as soon as they are accepted, go to repository where they are available for review by well vetted boards. I belong to one such, the Faculty of 1000, and their gimmick is charging for access to ratings. That seems a lot more fair to me.
Of course, the NY times does a terrible job of supporting this BS by acting as conduit for the prestige journals. Some of these, in my not so humble opinion, are badly reviewed and ought to belong to Murdoch because they are kins to his tabloids … Nature and the NE Journal are amongst the worst!