Elsevier's recent update to its letter to the mathematical community

I agree with the authors complaints (I'm not in the same field, but the general complaint holds across disciplines). However the solution really is trivial. The machine learning community solved this problem a decade ago when the editorial board (40 of them) resigned en-mass from the Machine Learning Journal: <a href="http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/statement.html" rel="nofollow">http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/statement.html</a> JMLR (<a href="http://jmlr.org" rel="nofollow">http://jmlr.org</a>) is now the premier venue for machine learning publications, and you can visit their home page to see the (non-)restrictions they place on access. They are also very cheap to subscribe to if you prefer dead trees. Any other discipline that really cared about open access could do the same in a heart-beat. The research produced by a discipline is largely consumed by that discipline. If they want to know who is keeping the academic publishing racket alive they just need to look at themselves.

&#62;Urs countered that “according to Florian Breuer’s computations the University of Stellenbosch, South-Africa pays roughly the same than the University of Muenster, Germany.<p>wow. Given that Stellenbosch is substantially smaller and in a 3rd world country one would expect that they'd pay less.

That story about the MFN clause (if there is even a clause) is amusing.<p>The academic publishing industry seems a bit like the film and recording industries. They do not want to face the fact that distribution and production are becoming less expensive. And they are going to fight to the end.<p>But their high fee structures will eventually be unsustainable.<p>UCal tried to take at least one of these publishers on some years ago, forcing them to renegotiate licensing terms. What ever became of that?