The Monopoly and Monetization of Academic Publication Rights: Toward Fairness in Scholarly Publishing Rights

With the highly commercialized development of the global academic publishing system, the right to publish papers has gradually evolved from a "knowledge dissemination mechanism" into a scarce resource controlled by a few publishing groups and platforms. In the current system, authors not only face high rejection rates and lengthy review processes during the submission stage, but also bear the dual pressure of high subscription fees and open access (OA) publication fees during the reading and dissemination stages. This structural asymmetry has led to the de facto "quasi-monopolization" and "monetization" of the right to publish papers. This paper analyzes the formation mechanism and economic logic of the monopoly of the right to publish papers, starting from the institutional structure of academic publishing, and further explores the practical dilemmas faced by preprint platforms, the open access movement, and new academic dissemination technologies. Finally, this paper proposes a reform path towards fairness, including decentralized review mechanisms, the reconstruction of the publicly funded publishing system and the academic evaluation system, in order to promote the evolution of the academic dissemination system towards a more open and equitable direction.