). "Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist?...While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but...to academic publishers....Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities....You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £0 for 00 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $00.00....Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free....The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 00%....More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can't publish the same material....What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it....In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs....The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us." The Library at the University of California Berkeley formerly maintained a dynamic list of 