Re: Time for universities to say enough is enough
"aren’t universities (and ultimately students and / or tax-payers) paying both for the resources to produce content for journals and paying lots of money for the content they’ve provided to be shipped back to them with a ribbon on top?"
Yup.
Academic publishing was a racket before the web - journals make high profit margins and basically get academics to provide and proof-read most of the content for free, and then charge them to read it again afterwards. Now the web does exist, it's even more so. This is worse still because even some 'reputable' journals have decidedly shabby practices when it comes to checking up on their contributors; since the mid eighties, there have been a number of high-profile hoax papers submitted to and accepted by big journals without any effort to check up on whether the author is who they claim to be or has actually done the research.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
