[[TL;DR for this comment - Publishers are taking advantage of a prisoner's dilemma / competitive closed market to monetize the near-zero value they supply.]] P

[[TL;DR for this comment - Publishers are taking advantage of a prisoner's dilemma / competitive closed market to monetize the near-zero value they supply.]] Professors don't get much money from direct publication -- in fact, many conferences charge the professors who provide the content. They get paid by grants and their schools. Professors don't want their research to reach a limited audience. The universities doesn't want this either. The only people in the chain who want limited access are the publishers, since this is how they make money. But between researchers, universities, grants, and publishers, the publishers contribute the least value by far. They generally rely entirely on other professors to edit their journals and conference proceedings, and for all the content. They charge ridiculous rates - often thousands of dollars for a single annual journal subscription - and get away with it because the system is not prone to change. Researchers are rewarded for publishing in "the best" journals, so no one wants to take the leap to publishing in a free space where there is currently much less prestige. That's basically why academic publishing is messed up. Because there's money to made in keeping it messed up, and money to be lost in fixing it. But the ones who generate the real value _do_ want things to be as freely available as possible. If a critical mass of top-tier researchers agreed to stop publishing in non-free journals and conferences, it would probably start a revolution in this area -- but that's a lot to ask. It's a prisoner's dilemma, in that the "traitor" researchers who keep publishing in the old journals will be rewarded. (This is all about academia -- I guess motivations may be different in industry-backed research.)