At Publisher Pro, we advocate independent open access publishing, because over the last 40 years, we've watched commercial journal publishers extract free labor from academics, make obscene profits, and give almost nothing back. #AcademicChatter #academicwriting #phdlife ctd. When the oldest of us completed our PhDs in the 1980s, journals were mainly published by departments, universities, or professional organizations. Subscriptions were cheap. Most scholars subscribed to a few journals, while libraries ordered those most useful to their users.