trying hard to sympathize with this letter So , a bunch of societies publish journals which rely on closed access and library subscription fees to survive. The

trying hard to sympathize with this letter So , a bunch of societies publish journals which rely on closed access and library subscription fees to survive. They are afraid to start charging for the open access fees, because they know that authors will prefer to publishing in other, better known open access journals instead. So they attempt to lobby Trump using the sleaziest of pretenses, appealing to his "america first" sensitivities. They also misrepresent themselves as they don't operate in an open private marketplace, since library subscriptions are practically mandatory and paid by the state in most of europe and much of US. They don't produce the intellectual property they describe either - the original authors do and also hold copyrights to it. Plus they publish a ton of submissions from foreign countries so, what are they talking about? So ... these guys should look up "streisand effect" It is inevitable that mandatory open access will lead to consolidation to a few open access libraries. That's both good and bad , but significantly more good