Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free
The latest effort is taking shape in the cognitive-science community, where a group of researchers are petitioning the publishing giant Elsevier to lower fees to publish open-access papers in Cognition, a well-regarded journal.
.. Elsevier, Springer, and Taylor & Francis have all reported profit margins around 35 percent, more than Facebook (27 percent) or the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the largest bank in the world (29 percent).
.. In 2012, more than 12,000 researchers vowed to boycott Elsevier for supporting the Research Works Act (RWA), a bill that would have made it illegal for federal grants to require grantees to publish the work in open-access journals.