I recommend Ars Technica’s well-written summary of a recent paper in PLoS Medicine that studied the scientific publishing industry from a purely economic model. I believe that the for-profit model of most scientific journals is broken and ripe for disruption by open access journals, such as PLoS Medicine, so I’m inclined to look at the paper from a biased viewpoint. I will note, though, that since the paper is in a PLoS journal, I can choose to look at the results more critically without having to pay out the nose to do so.