Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon have published "Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of Its Journals" in MediaTropes.
Here's an excerpt:
Despite holding the potential to liberate scholarly information, the digital era has, to the contrary, increased the control of a few for-profit publishers. While most journals in the print era were owned by academic institutions and scientific societies, the majority of scientific papers are currently published by five for-profit publishers, which often exhibit profit margins between 30%-40%. This paper documents the evolution of this consolidation over the last 40 years, discusses the peculiar economics of scholarly publishing, and reflects upon the role of publishers in today's academe.
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