Michael Eisen

Academic publishing is a multi-million dollar business dominated by just a few major publishing houses. Many academics and open access advocates believe that's unfair-publishers simply take researchers' work and sell it back to them, they say. Stan Correy takes a look at the state of play.

In 2001, I did a story for RN's Background Briefing called Knowledge Indignation: Road Rage on the Information Superhighway.

That rage was aimed at companies in the STM industry-science, technology and medical publishing.  Leading the charge against these commercial publishers were scientists, doctors, university librarians and other researchers

"There are so many opportunities and - if we're honest - challenges for innovation in digital publishing it's hard to pick one and stick with it, but that's exactly what I'm going to do because some things are worth sticking with."

So declares Cecy Marden, open access project manager at the Wellcome Trust, in a post on the New York Academy of Medicine's Books, Health, and History blog ahead of her involvement in discussions of digital publishing innovations at the American Historical Association's annual meeting next month.

Unsurprisingly, she is ardently sticking to open access