“It’s not just that journal prices keep going up without any evident relationship to costs,” said Robert Kiley, head of digital services at London’s Wellcome Library. “There is also a concern that so much research, which in many cases has been funded by the taxpayer, is locked behind publishers’ pay walls.”

Asked to explain how publishers justify their rising prices, Tom Reller, a spokesman for the scholarly publisher Elsevier, based in the Netherlands, declined to comment. But in testimony before a British parliamentary select committee in 2004, Sir Crispin Davis, the company’s chief executive, said that over the previous five years “the number of new research articles we have published each year has increased by an average of 3 to 5 percent a year. Against those kinds of increases we think that the price rises of 6 to 7.5 percent are justified.” At the same hearing Richard Charkin, chairman of Macmillan, which publishes the journal Nature, said, “High quality journals like Nature have a high unit cost per paper published, because for every article published more than 10 have been reviewed and deselected.”

Like newspapers and the music business, scholarly publishing has been drastically affected by the Internet. But the differences are as striking as the parallels. Unlike journalists, most academics are paid for research or teaching, not writing. Yet all academics need to publish their work — to share and validate their research and also, crucially, to advance their careers. A scholar who does not publish regularly generally does not get promoted, making for a one-sided relationship with publishers.

Sales figures, which can often be counted in the hundreds, matter far less than impact — the number of times a publication is cited by other researchers. And most journals rely on unpaid academic peer reviewers, rather than a paid editorial staff, to select articles for publication All of which makes the economics of scholarly publishing very different from that for either newspapers, which depend on advertisers and a mass readership, or music.

“Scholars write journal articles for impact, not for money,” said Peter Suber, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. “And while there are a lot of misunderstandings most people understand that open access is not like file sharing music or video piracy. Open access relies on the copyright holder’s consent.”