A huge shift in the economic system came about with the industrial revolution. The use of machinery powered by sources other than human labor allowed a huge leap in productivity, but the investment required was largely beyond any one investor. The most efficient means of raising large sums of money was to lessen the burden by pooling resources, so that many people share in the funding and the profits of the enterprise. This is typically known as share ownership, and the financial vehicle for this type of ownership is a corporation. Shareholders may be paid a dividend out of profits and, if the shares are publicly tradable, may trade their stock as it changes value. The central feature of a for-profit corporation, though, is its ability to shield individual owners-the shareholders-from personal liability. Debts accumulated by the corporation belong to the corporation and not the individual owners. Furthermore, corporations are perpetual, in that they survive the coming and going of individuals, and thus projects and assets can be maintained over time.

Before the advent of electronic publishing and of the Web, researchers had never criticized the business model of scientific publishing, where journals were paid by subscription, since there were no other ways for their articles to be disseminated and read. In those years, researchers were sending handwritten manuscripts to be peer-reviewed by researchers who were experts of the scientific domain covered by the journal. Publishers were printing houses in charge of typesetting, printing and selling the journals to libraries. Today, the era of paper publishing is over and replaced by the era of electronic publishing. Indeed, recent articles, as well as older ones that have been digitalized, are exchanged electronically via the Web. Even for journals that are still printed on paper, their production is made electronically. Moreover, most readers download articles from the Web and print them only if needed. This technological revolution has allowed publishers to drastically reduce their costs, and researchers to typeset their articles themselves, while both peer-reviewing and publishing are made online via electronic platforms.