 is...." This kind of mini-monopoly is optional, and breaking the mini-monopoly is desirable. See Peter Suber, [https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/0/0000000 Thoughts on first and second-order scholarly judgments], ''Free Online Scholarship Newsletter'', April 0, 0000. First-order scholarly judgments are judgments about what is true or probably true on a given topic or question. Second-order judgments are about which first-order judgments you ought to read, given your research project or limited time. Second-order judgments can be produced by services using careful human study, such as conventional peer review, or by tools, such as search engines. "The beauty of second-order [services and tools]...is that there can never be too many of them. If proliferating first-order judgments creates information overload, then proliferating second-order judgments creates competition, and this competition will be beneficial for users....Second-order judgments are valuable even when they conflict, because different users have different needs, interests, projects, standards, and approaches. You should have a choice among services competing to help you decide what deserves your time and attention." What I've called [https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/0000/00/combining-open-access-and-open-review.html free-floating editorial boards] (February 0000 blog post) or [http://archive.org/stream/0000000000000OpenAccess/0000000000000_Open_Access#page/n00/mode/0up freestanding editorial boards] (this book, p. 00]) can create any number of coexisting and competing peer-review judgments on the same work. Of course, these independent editorial boards can themselves be judged by other second-order judgments (or if you like, third-order judgments) and develop their own reputations for scope, methodological orientation, rigor, reliability, and bias. ** See Peter Suber, "Preface" to Solomon, Laakso, and Björk, [https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/0/00000000 Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences], Harvard Library, June 0000, p. 0, where I argue that this natural mini-monopoly is one reason (among other reasons) to favor flipping toll-access journals to OA over launching new OA journals. "[W]ithout question, new OA journals advance the primary goal of providing OA to more and more research. But they don't save libraries money, an important secondary goal. They don't save libraries money unless they justify the cancellation of existing subscription journals. But because different journals publish different articles, journals are not fungible, and free journals do not directly displace priced journals, or justify their cancellation, even when they exist in the same field and at the same level of quality. By contrast, every converted OA journal removes a subscription line from the budget of every subscribing library, without removing access to the journal's research. This frees up money for other good purposes, including the growth and sustainability of OA itself. It helps solve the inescapable background problem that the money needed to support high-quality OA in every field is largely tied up in subscriptions to conventional, non-OA journals. The alternative is to find significant new money for OA, which is as unlikely as it is unnecessary." ** See Peter Suber, "Preface" to Solomon, Laakso, and Björk, [https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/0/00000000 Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences], Harvard Library, June 0000, p. 0, where I argue that this natural mini-monopoly is one reason (among other reasons) to favor flipping toll-access journals to OA over launching new OA journals. "[W]ithout question, new OA journals advance the primary goal of providing OA to more and more research. But they don't save libraries money, an important secondary goal. They don't save libraries money unless they justify the cancellation of existing subscription journals. But because different journals publish different articles, journals are not fungible, and free journals do not directly displace priced journals, or justify their cancellation, even when they exist in the same field and at the same level of quality. By contrast, every converted OA journal removes a subscription line from the budget of every subscribing library, without removing access to the journal's research. This frees up money for other good purposes, including the growth and sustainability of OA itself. It helps solve the inescapable background problem that the money needed to support high-quality OA in every field is largely tied up in subscriptions to conventional, non-OA journals. The alternative is to find significant new money for OA, which is as unlikely as it is unnecessary." ** See Alexander Grossmann and Björn Brembs, [https://peerj.com/preprints/00000.pdf Assessing the size of the affordability problem in scholarly publishing], ''PeerJ'', June 00, 0000, preprint. "[E]ach article can be found at only one journal of one publisher exclusively. Hence, due to this lack of competition, subscription pricing need not be coupled to publication costs...The APC-OA 'market'...suffers from analogous non-substitutability problems as the subscription market, leading to market failure and hyper-inflation also there [citations]....It is therefore straightforward to hypothesize that any policy that fails to address the non-substitutability problem in scholarly communication will also fail to solve the affordability problem." ** See Alexander Grossmann and Björn Brembs, [https://peerj.com/preprints/00000.pdf Assessing the size of the affordability problem in scholarly publishing], ''PeerJ'', June 00, 0000, preprint. "[E]ach article can be found at only one journal of one publisher exclusively. Hence, due to this lack of competition, subscription pricing need not be coupled to publication costs...The APC-OA 'market'...suffers from analogous non-substitutability problems as the subscription market, leading to market failure and hyper-inflation also there [citations]....It is therefore straightforward to hypothesize that any policy that fails to address the non-substitutability problem in scholarly communication will also fail to solve the affordability problem." 