We all know what sort of the challenge digital age brought to a publishing industry. Print media has literally gone out of business. The remaining few are struggling for their very survival. This is not, however, the case for academic publishers.

Online journal publication and dissemination led to the elimination of various costs. Meanwhile, for the past two decades, academic journal subscription fees have increased 5 to 10 percent on an annual basis. The combination of these two facts resulted undeniably in publishers’ soaring profit. The digital age, in effect, brought windfall profits to the academic publishers.

Digital technology, widely used by publishers, has immensely cut publishing and dissemination costs attributed to journals. Nonetheless, the publishers increase subscription fees at a rate which ranges from 5 to 10 percent on annual basis, according to the CBC report.

The challenges libraries are facing is not limited to paying high subscription fees. Often, they are systematically coerced into paying for less interesting journals just to get their hands on the essential ones. The publishers call this approach ‘bundle subscription’. This way libraries around the world end up paying millions for journal subscriptions annually. The CBS report shows that the University of Montreal spends $7 million on journal subscriptions alone each year. These huge and ever increasing subscription payments have dire consequences for universities: they have forced quite a number of them to shut down some of their libraries.

The industry of scientific journal publishing is dominated by a handful of companies. The CBC report shows that the top five publishing companies are responsible for publishing 53% of all scientific journals in the field of natural and medical sciences. The figure goes even higher in the field of social sciences: 70% of all scholarly output comes from top five publishers. This dominance has, expectedly, led to astonishing profits: scholarly journal publishers enjoy a 40% profit margin.

Industry dominant publishers have been facing challenges over their practices and subscriptions fees. They are being constantly challenged by the open access movements which advocate strongly for unlimited and warranted free access to all research out puts; largely to those funded by the tax payers’ money. United Academics is one of those open access advocates that work to ensure the society gets free access to scholarly output.