50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science

Dr. Douglas Fields draws out the dark sides of the shift currently happening in the publishing industry. 

Newsweek is dead. But we have Twitter. Harper-Collins just closed its last warehouse of books in the United States. Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher of scholarly books and journals in the world, printing continuously since 1584, ceased printing operations this year and will outsource printing to another company. The Press survived tumultuous changes since the Middle Ages — the coming and going of plagues, the rise and fall of empires, wars and famine — but it could not sustain itself in the new environment of digital publication and self-publication that the electronic medium feeds.

Dr. Douglas Fields. Huff Post. Science. The Blog. 

See also the comments by Björn Brembs, declaring that Fields is wrong on open access.

Please have a look at this post by Jalees Rehman, cell biologist and as a physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), too.