The Academic Publishing Paywall Copyright Subsidized Racket

by Stephan Kinsella on November 9, 2025

On Leading by Example and the Power of Attraction (Open Source Publishing, Creative Commons, Public Domain Publishing)
Tucker, The Magic of Open-Source Publishing
Kulldorff, The Rise and Fall of Scientific Journals and a Way Forward
Academic publishers have become the enemies of science: yet more real piracy
Tucker, The Magic of Open-Source Publishing
Tucker, “Authors: Beware of Copyright,” in Bourbon for Breakfast (Mises Institute, 2010)
Authors: Don’t Make the Buddy Holly Mistake
On other rackets: Douglas E. French, When Movements Become Rackets and Other Swindles: The PFS Trilogy, Stephan Kinsella, ed. (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2025)

I’ve complained over the years that many libertarian scholars and writers—often academics and intellectuals who publish scholarly books and journal articles—make the mistake of publishing with commercial or, worse, academic publishing houses that paywall their work. They spend all this effort to develop theory and spread the word of liberty, but then don’t even bother to try to make it easily accessible online. In my view they should put up a free PDF at the very least, and either negotiate permission with the publisher or journal or select a journal that publishes online for free, like the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Reason Papers, The Independent Review, or various open access journals (there are many of these; see this Grok summary). Unfortunately, other journals in our space, shamefully, are paywalled and closed, e.g. the Review of Austrian Economics and Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. The RAE used to be open when published by the Mises Institute, but when Rothbard died in 1995, the Mises Institute switched the QJAE and turned the RAE over to the Hayekians at George Mason or something who then moved to a closed, paywalled model.

I post all my material open access and free online, where possible—either under CC-BY or, better yet, CC0—and did so with Libertarian Papers (2008–2018). All the books I now publish for Papinian Press are CC0 or CC-BY.

The excuse given by these lazy academics is that they need tenure so have to publish in peer reviewed and expensive and paywalled journals. But this is not true. There are many open journals. Moreover, the author could negotiate the right to post a PDF of their paper, or post a pre-print or draft version on SSRN, Academia, and so on. But they don’t bother. They don’t even try. Why they don’t want to get the word out is a mystery. Why they spend so much time writing, and not even getting paid, and don’t care that poorer people in, say, the Third World can’t access their work, or have it indexed and easily findable on Google or other search engines, is beyond me. Many of them are past tenure so could at least use open journals or self-publish, but they are just incompetent or clueless or don’t care. Boldrin and Levine published Against Intellectual Monopoly with Cambridge, and negotiated the right to post a free version online. Other scholars do not seem to even try.

Jeffrey Tucker and I often bemoan and discuss this. We think something like this is going on.

First, as I have noted,

The roots of copyright lie in censorship. It was easy for state and church to control thought by controlling the scribes, but then the printing press came along, and the authorities worried that they couldn’t control official thought as easily. So Queen Mary created the Stationer’s Company in 1557, with the exclusive franchise over book publishing, to control the press and what information the people could access. When the charter of the Stationer’s Company expired, the publishers lobbied for an extension, but in the Statute of Anne (1710), Parliament gave copyright to authors instead. Authors liked this because it freed their works from state control. Nowadays they use copyright much as the state originally did: to censor and ban books—or their publishers do, who have gained a quasi-oligopolistic gatekeeper function, courtesy of copyright law.¹

In other words, after the first attempt to stop freedom of the press (the Stationer’s Company) started to expire, the Statute of Anne gave copyright to authors, but because they had no way to self-publish, they had to turn to publishers and hand over rights back over to them. The publishers have maintained their control ever since.² It is only recently, since the advent of Amazon and self-publishing, that this monopoly is starting to see cracks.³

In the meantime, most scholars were academics employed by universities. Often their salaries are paid or subsidized by the state. To make tenure and advance in their careers, they had to publish articles in scholarly journals and write books. They usually write these articles for free and make almost nothing on books, but the publishers make a killing—selling these books and journals to university libraries, which, like the professors’ salaries, are also often subsidized by the state. The journals and books are sold at obscene prices due to copyright an the captive market of libraries, and paywalled so only other academics can easily read them.

So here we have the public paying salaries to professors to write articles sold to libraries paid for by the public and protected by copyright paywalls so the public cannot access the work they paid for. And the academics don’t even get to spread their ideas beyond the cloisters of the ivory tower. Meanwhile, older academics are too lazy and technologically clueless, and too cowardly and mainstream to even think of bucking the system—by insisting on a free PDF version or self-publishing or publishing in the growing number of open source journals. Even after they have tenure and could easily get around this hoary old system.

Hopefully the Internet and open publishing and the rise of younger, more tech-savvy academics, will begin to put a dent in the evil publishing industry.