To put it bluntly, the current state of academic publishing is the result of a series of strong-arm tactics enabling publishers to pry copyrights from authors, and then charge exorbitant fees to university libraries for access to that work. The publishers have inverted their role as disseminators of knowledge and become bottlers of knowledge, releasing it exclusively to the highest bidders.
That's also to put it a bit too crudely: in fact, publishers provide value, through copy-editing, preservation, and distribution of scholarship. They need to recoup those costs, and they do that, partly, through copyright. Without a doubt, some publishers, especially in the sciences, have been exploiting their market position not just to recoup costs, but to extract substantial profits and to restrict access to knowledge considerably. Aaron Swartz (the anniversary of his suicide is the occasion for Peter's piece) was a victim of prosecutorial over-reaching, which happens much more than people realize, but usually not to middle-class white kids. That doesn't mean Peter's "blunt" characterization of academic publishing is wholly fair. (Peter will be a guest-blogger again in the Spring, so readers will no doubt get to hear more from him on this subject then.)
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