The problem is that that you want to publish in prestigious journals and conferences and the ACM, the IEEE, and everyone else has made deals with publishers to publish the proceedings because the ACM et al aren&#x27;t publishers. The deals made more sense in the pre digital age, when your only option to read the papers was to get a phone book sized book once a year, but now it&#x27;s just stupid. Even at universities you can hit the paywall if the journal you want isn&#x27;t on the whitelist. You end up googling the title and hoping to find it off the authors&#x27; websites.<p>Packing up and creating a new open access journal is possible, but it&#x27;s hard, because essentially you need a critical mass of the highly regarded members of the community to go with you, because the real power is in the the reputation that the community provides. It&#x27;s hard to do, but is possible. Linguists are moving from Elsevier published Lingua to a new open access journal called Cognition.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;elsevier-academic-publishing-petition&#x2F;427059&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;elsevier-...</a>