It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is
It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to.<p>It&#x27;s more that the taxpayer is fleeced by academia in general (the whole research-funding-publishing complex) for many billions because there&#x27;s no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves. (As Doctorow notes, they already review the manuscripts, so all that&#x27;s left for an existing journal&#x27;s editorial team to do is vote for a chief editor and switch to any one of many open, free research publication services.)<p>Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research.