For a bit more context, my favorite article on the topic: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-scie

For a bit more context, my favorite article on the topic: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... tl;dr: Scientific publishing wasn't always like this. Publication was run mostly by scientific societies, who would charge little more than the physical cost of printing, but were inefficient and had huge backlogs. The shift to the current status quo was pioneered by a literal conman, Robert Maxwell, who saw an opportunity to build a "perpetual financing machine". Maxwell eventually moved on to massive pension fraud instead [1], but in the meanwhile succeeded in building up Pergamon Press (the Elsevier-before-Elsevier) into a juggernaut with 47% profit margins. A few particularly relevant quotes: > As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars. > Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he 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. > Scientific conferences tended to be drab, low-ceilinged affairs, but when Maxwell returned to the Geneva conference that year, he rented a house in nearby Collonge-Bellerive, a picturesque town on the lakeshore, where he entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him. “He always said we don’t compete on sales, we compete on authors,” Albert Henderson, a former deputy director at Pergamon, told me. “We would attend conferences specifically looking to recruit editors for new journals.” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Aftermath:_Theft_of_pension_funds,_collapse_of_a_publishing_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Aftermath:_Thef...