In Greg Crane's latest essay
(https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nSt2V7Bt1weVSAMjiDQw-d-Rg2DivZSyI12g3Xxq8tY/edit),
he says:
"But allowing commercial publishers to sell academic work no longer
constitutes the best mechanism for disseminating academic content."
If that is indeed true, how do we explain the phenomenon that the vast
majority of scholars and scientists still choose, each time they have
a piece of their best work ready for dissemination, to use
'commercial' (this term includes not-for-profit publishers such as
university presses and learned societies) publishers? One consequence
of these choices is that when Research Councils UK disseminated 10M
GBP to support article processing charges to ensure open access, the
largest beneficiaries were Elsevier and Wiley (about 2M each).
Jim O'Donnell (open access publisher since 1990)
Arizona State University
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