We're all publishers now

Martin Weller's tweet yesterday set me thinking about publishing overnight. I don't have a problem with commercial publishing. In a free market, companies can charge what they want. And why would a company pay for open access out of their own revenue stream? That's not something you see Sky, Virgin or Marks and Spencer doing - why should they? But that doesn't mean there's not a problem. The problem is that academia is incompatible with commercial publishing models. That's why we need new publishing models. Inevitably, these will involve the Internet. And equally inevitably, they will not fit into the traditional commercial model.

But along the line, somebody somewhere has to pay the costs.

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