If you're interested in the question of academic journals, there's a lot of good stuff in this comment thread. The consensus seems to be that they made sense at one point in time when you needed someone to take on the job of choosing good research and collecting it for libraries, and now they survive because they're a) profitable for the publishers and b) serving an advancement function for academics. Indeed, Neil Sinhababu, about as public-spirited a thinker as you'll find, writes:
I'd love it if the government could buy the journals out of the publishers' hands and open them to the public. I hear that some of that has happened in the sciences. The money taxpayers pay out in doing that would soon be recouped, at least in part, by public university academic libraries not having to pay subscription fees. Bonus: Ezra and other ordinary folk get to read my stuff without paying.But I'm going to keep sending most of my papers to old-line journals that Ezra can't read and hoping they get accepted. After I got a paper accepted in Philosophical Review two months ago (it's perhaps the top journal in the discipline), one of my colleagues told me that at some places, people can get tenure just for that! I'd love to have more people read my stuff, but if I just put it on the web for free hardly anybody would even know it was there, or that it was worth reading. Get it into Philosophical Review, and I'm assured that my colleagues will see it, my adversaries will respond to it, and people hiring or promoting me will be impressed.
A sidenote here is that the incentives are all mucked up. If researchers had to buy individual subscriptions to these incredibly expensive journals, the outcry would end the practice in a day. But they don't. The university libraries pay the fee, put everything in searchable form, and so the main consumers of the research -- academics -- are taken care of. In theory, the university libraries should want to stop paying the fee, but that's a collective action problem on the one hand (no one university could unilaterally stop providing access as its researchers would suffer) and arguably a bureaucratic problem on the other, as it's good for the library staff to still be the access point to the journals. And the losers are, well, all of us, who can't read and benefit from the research.
