Opinion: Patients vs. paywalls: Is the U.S. ready for open-access publishing?

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier recently came under fire after its director of scholarly communications, William Gunn, wrote a controversial tweet in response to a post that “people shouldn’t have to jump through hoops” to access important medical research.

Yes, everyone should have rainbows, unicorns, & puppies delivered to their doorstep by volunteers. Y'all keep wishing for that, I'll keep working on producing the best knowledge and distributing it as best we can.

— mrgunn (@mrgunn) August 13, 2018

While I disagree entirely with the harsh tone of Gunn’s tweet, the underlying rationale behind his comment should not be overlooked: to manage submissions, peer review, editing, and publication, quality scientific publishing requires infrastructure that costs money.

In this age of fast and free access to published information, many people