Op/Ed: “Scholarly Publishers are Happy to Give Stuff Away if Someone Pays Them”

From Bloomberg Opinion (by Justin Fox):

For almost two decades, a battle has been raging over access to scholarly research. On the one side have been scholars, librarians, funders and others arguing that in an age of near-costless global communication, research findings and the data that underlie them should be shared freely and openly. On the other side have been publishers, led by Elsevier, a (very large) unit of under-the-radar London-based media giant RELX Plc,   fighting to maintain the remarkable profit margins that paywalled scholarly journals can provide.

That’s the simple version, at least — things have always been a little more complicated than that. But it was still jarring to observe this week in Berlin how much the battle lines have shifted.

Read the Complete Column (970 words)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Elsevier, News