Understanding the costs of scholarly publishing – Why we need a public data infrastructure of publishing costs – Open Knowledge International Blog
October 24, 2017, by Danny Lämmerhirt
Scholarly communication has undergone a seismic shift away from closed publishing towards an ever-growing support for open access. With closed publishing models, academic libraries faced a so-called “serials crisis” and were not able to afford the materials they needed for their researchers and students. Partly in response to this problem, open access advocates have argued for increased access, whilst also changing the cost structure of scholarly publishing. In many countries this has led to experiments with ‘author pays’ models, where the prices of large commercial publishers have remained high, but the costs have shifted from readers to researchers.
