Open access: What price affordability?

The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that learned societies struggled to cope with the growing demand from researchers for publication outlets. Spotting a lucrative market opportunity, for-profit companies (led by Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press) began to launch new scholarly journals [2], and to invite learned societies to outsource their journals to them, on the promise that by doing so they would be able to generate more money to subsidise their other activities.