George Monbiot – The Lairds of Learning.
“Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.”
Excellent piece on a much neglected subject. The only such expose of academic publishing that I have seen before is in a biography of Robert Maxwell and the role of academic publishing in his rise to fame.
(via Lalitha Kamath)
And a good follow-up from Ben Goldacre.
Academic publishers run a guarded knowledge economy
The business model for scholarly papers forms a barrier to the public, but can such walls remain standing?