John Baez: What We Can Do About Science Journals (January 8, 2006)

The problem of highly priced science journals is well-known. A wave of mergers in the publishing business has created giant firms with the power to extract ever higher journal prices from university libraries. As a result, libraries are continually being forced to cough up more money or cut their journal subscriptions. It's really become a crisis.

Luckily, there are also two counter-trends at work. In mathematics and physics, more and more papers are available from a free electronic database called the arXiv, and journals are beginning to let papers stay on this database even after they are published. In the life sciences, PubMed Central plays a similar role.

There are also a growing number of free electronic journals, especially in mathematics. Many of these are peer-reviewed, and most are run by academics instead of large corporations.