Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, has called on universities to boycott subscription journals whose hidden charges, high subscription fees, confidentiality demands and deceptive contracts are "exploiting their monopoly position."

In an article in the Guardian published 16 June 2014, a team of economists found that "for leading universities, journals published by non-profit organisations were two to 10 times better value than those published by commercial companies." 

One measure of "value" is how many citations - and thus, how much visibility and attention - papers receive.

For every citation in an Elsevier journal, authors paid up to three times as much those publishing in non-profit journals.

Various universities have expressed frustration at the publishing practises of for-profit publishers such as Elsevier and Springer; publishers demand up to 5% increases in subscription fees every year, costing millions. 

However, the universities were required to sign confidentiality agreements with the publishers and could not disclose these facts.

Thus, this research has exposed a side of academic publishing that has been kept deliberately secret. 

"The non-profits provide on average much better value for money, especially to the big universities," says Professor Paul Courant, an author on the study. "That much is clear."

Source: The Guardian. 

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