Exactly!!! And there's very little 'regular' scientists can do about this. It's a system upheld by senior academics' conceptions, funding agencies, and university management staff.
Seems like the only answer to this is law enforcing open sourcing of academic research, atleast that which is funded by the taxpayer; though not much hope of that with the lobbying pushed by the incumbent journals.
Yes, there used to be Plan S by the EU, 'all research has to be open access' - which led to an explosion in publisher's prices as people were forced to pay them! Nature used to be Closed Access only, but once Plan S came around they added an OA option for about 10k in euros. Ridiculous.
> Good news! We'll see how the publishers will torpedo it
Indeed! Maybe they will try to make it difficult to access but atleast as long as the access is open and free (as in beer), all those efforts will do is give rise to a secondary platform that will solve the ease-of-access issue.
I suggest you submit a new post once EU decision is final, either way, so that this topic stays in the forefront :)
