“The monopoly on information is increasingly an issue for the scientific community; an issue to which making journals open access seems to be the only solution.”
I don’t want to write a long article about this; that’s already been done. See, e.g., the links below. To summarize, greedy corporations buy up prestigious academic journals — then charge universities and scholars big bucks for access to them. These companies don’t fund research; they simply charge monopoly prices for access to the information created by the academic community.
Before these corporate vampires showed up, academic journals charged reasonable subscription and reprint fees to defray printing and mailing costs, and everyone was happy with that system. Electronic publishing should have reduced these costs, but instead subscription and reprint prices soared. Why? Because these corporations created a monopoly when no one was looking and then socked the academic community with monopoly pricing.
Some in the academic community are fighting back via the Open Access Movement. There’s no law that forces scholars to publish in for-profit journals. To break a monopoly, all you have to do is refuse to do business with it.
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2013/01/the-future-of-academic-publishing/
http://theconversation.com/the-great-publishing-swindle-the-high-price-of-academic-knowledge-6667
http://centrallobby.politicshome.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticle/ann-mckechin-mp-open-access-breaking-the-monopoly-of-large-academic-publishers/
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/07/23/is-the-academic-publishing-industry-on-the-verge-of-disruption