Simon McGarr of tuppenceworth.ie sends in this interesting tidbit:

Academic journals are a shell game. You have to publish in them if you want to be believed or promoted as a researcher. And every large library must subscribe to them if it is to take its job seriously.

But the fees for these subscriptions are astronomical, and rising. Hence the new Free access to information sources such as the Public Library of Science.

In the face of being eaten by the internet, it seems the old publishers have decided to introduce old fashioned bluster to the mix.

Article at nature.com.

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

Information wants to be free, it’ll eventually route around bureaucracy just as it routes around censorship.