The academic publishing industry has long been seen as unfair. Typically, researchers who submit papers to journals are not paid and sometimes have to pay a fee. Peer reviewers, who ensure the quality is up to scratch, do the work for free, too. After publication, though, neither academics nor the public can access the research without paying eye-watering fees.
A huge challenge to this model has just come from the University of California, which, as reported in Vox, has taken the bold step of cancelling its $11-million annual subscription to the science publisher Elsevier – which has an annual revenue of $3.2 billion and a profit margin of 19 per cent.
