Mark C. Wilson, a senior lecturer at Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, writing for The Conversation (h/t Slashdot):
University research is generally funded from the public purse. The results, however, are published in peer-reviewed academic journals, many of which charge subscription fees. I had to use freedom of information laws to determine how much universities in New Zealand spend on journal subscriptions to give researchers and students access to the latest research — and I found they paid almost US$15 million last year to just four publishers. There are additional costs, too. Paywalls on research hold up scientific progress and limit the public’s access to the latest information.
Even better is that one university was paying markedly more for the same access than the others.
It’s just four companies, doing this. How long will this cartel be permitted to plunder us all?
I can report some encouraging news from Norway. Apparently, new rules are soon to be implemented that require all state-financed research here to be published open access.
This seems somewhat contradictory to the current system of result-based university financing, which strongly encourages researchers to publish in prestigious (“level 2”) channels that are rarely if ever open access. I have not fully grasped how this is going to work.
information in Norwegian:
https://www.openaccess.no/
That is excellent news. No doubt over time some open source repos will become more prestigious than others.