Ansh Bhatnagar, writing for Tribune, the revived magazine of the British left:
Scientific knowledge doesn’t just need to be free to read – it needs to be owned and democratically controlled by the society it is meant to benefit. Publicly owned scientific publishing is the way to do that.
It’s a good piece, grounded in the view that scholarship and profit are in irredeemable conflict. Still, the idea of “public ownership” is, at best, ambiguous—elsewhere in the article Bhatnagar seems to refer to public funding paired with ownership and governance by the academic community. That sounds right—direct state ownership less so.