As a non-academic who regularly reads papers in math, physics and economics, I can't wait for the day when all the rent-seeking academic journal publishing houses are forced out of the market and are prevented from further ruining academia by fanning the artificial flames of "publish or perish".

My biggest frustration is that it's impossible to access these journals if you're not affiliated with a university. The corporate journal monopolists like Springer and Elsevier absolutely gouge the universities to sell back to the schools what the schools essentially produced themselves. Have you ever checked out the fees they charge? It's on their websites, just try to sign up. It's $50k+ for an annual license, and that's on the cheap end for access to just a handful of journals—prices go way higher for full packages! This is a real scandal, especially with university budgets being bled nation wide due to the economic depression, and unavoidable, severe cuts not seen in generations! For a recent analysis of publishers sweetheart deals entitling them to profit margins above 25%, see: http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguig....
How many kids can you keep in college for one year if the schools were keeping that 25% profit margin?

So universities are forced to restrict access by their contract, and the publishers have no incentive
to even sell to consumers—why should they when they can make astronomically more selling only to schools? Granted, all the publishers do sell individual papers to consumers, but not at a price that clears the market. Expect to be charged $20 for a 30 year old 5 page paper covering an obscure Thermodynamics topic. It could be argued that the publishers own the rights(or not: authors being forced to sign away all rights in order to even be published is another scandal), so they can make up any price they want. However, what is a fair price to charge when the author of the paper themselves are giving their paper away for free to download from their personal .edu site!

Ultimately, access to information and research becomes highly restricted when everyone plays this strategy. Isn't this consequence the exact opposite of the intent of the Internet? Call me an idealist, but scholarly writings ought to be made as widely available as possible, especially for the general public, for little to no profit.

I used to think one optimal solution was for a quasi-benevolent org, such as Google, to just buy all academic papers and publication rights and put all of it on the web, like with Google Print. Google could care less about manipulating and creating an artificial journal market, no, they have a much bigger objective: collect as much free content as possible in order to draw in more eyeballs to show them more ads to increase the CPC. Google Scholar started with the right idea, but they never did anything with the product.

I've been happy to see Arxiv gaining more traction in the past few years. It's also been encouraging to see the recent federal laws mandating that any research funded with federal money be made freely available, so the paywalls can't touch those papers(unfortunately this seems to be contained mostly to NIH medical publications).

One interesting recent trend I've noticed is the effect of academics being much more web savy compared to ten years ago—now you can pretty much find any paper published within the past decade for free on the author's own .edu site. That is, if you know exactly what you're looking for, and don't mind spending a few minutes sifting Google, and don't mind discovering many papers are not freely accessible. It's a less than ideal search experience, but it works well enough. Unfortunately all the pre-web papers are still locked behind paywalls. I'm also giddy to see the upcoming Mac tablet's impact on the journals vis a vis its rumored plans to disrupt the college textbook market.