This is a two-sided market, where the publishers are the middlemen between scientists publishing their results and readers of the papers. You argue that the si

This is a two-sided market, where the publishers are the middlemen between scientists publishing their results and readers of the papers. You argue that the side scientists - publisher is a free market. I consider this as dubious because of, say, impact factors, but for the sake of argumentation, I'll accept it for now. But the really interesting side of the market is not scientist - publisher, but publisher - reader (this is what the original article is all about). And this is part of the two-sided market clearly is a monopoly, since there is no competition between publishers for a given paper, but there is only one publisher that is allowed to sell access to a paper (thanks to the copyright laws). TLDR: Thanks to the copyright laws one side of the two-sided market is a monopoly.