A brilliant article on the business of scientific publishing from the early roots and the story of Robert Maxwell to the rise of the internet and the present day.
“Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he [Robert Maxwell] told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted.
In response to the internet Elsevier bundled – Elsevier created a switch that fused Maxwell’s thousands of tiny monopolies into one so large that, like a basic resource – say water, or power – it was impossible for universities to do without.“
