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Agreed. But I watched the whole system from yet another perspective.
At one long ago job I used to spend hours in the bio-science library at UCB doing bibliographic research and checking on various topics. The journals were about the only resource for this work. You pick a line of research and start with a few recent key articles' bibliographies and work backwards. After a few weeks of this you get a pretty good idea of the broad outline of what is the current state of knowledge and which experiemental lines are likely to bare fruit, and where your project might stand in relation to other work in the field.
There really is no other way to gain this view, except through follow up to conferences and presentations.
Some days, I would be down on Shattuck for lunch and then hike back up to campus on Center and pass the old UC printing office. This was where the old class cateloge, informational brocures and other UC system publications were printed, bound, and boxed up for distribution.
The printing office was in the process of moving and partly shuting down---more of the privatization stuff that was everywhere in the 90s. I think the UC system was outsourcing most of its printing jobs by then.
I used to think what a shame to throw that all away. Under a new regime (mine), I would have the printing office expanded to include all the production of the UC Press, and a whole series of journals, with a nice big editorial staff, lots of hob-knobing with hopeful grad students, young professors and lab people, as a classic center of knowledge production---a hub (public space) where the isolation that characterizes so much of academic and intellectual life could be ameliorated.
There is a biography of Gaston Gallimard who was the publisher of the famous french Editions Gallimard. It's worth reading this bio because it paints a view of publishing that must be very rare. For example, Camus had an very small office space there after the war to get him by, and where he met people like Sartre, Gide, Malraux and others who all published there. (Gide along with Paul Valrey were founders of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise NRF before WWI---which later morphed into Gallimard). Camus died in a car crash with Michel Gallimard, the old man's son.
In any event, the portrait of Gallimard and his writers was just wonderful---where you would like to be, if you were a writer. Old Gaston wasn't exactly a hero since he performed an elaborate colaboration dance with the Nazis during the occupation---sort of sleaze shit---but...
Anyway, reading about Gallimard gave me an idea of how to reform academic publishing---which if you think on it a bit should be more like a collective than a nasty, competitive and basically destructive system we have now. The idea is taken from Gide's journals where he writes about his dream of creating a modern litrary magazine---where he could publish his own work along with that of his friends of course.
...The professor over seeing the lab I worked at was also an editor for one of the plant bio-science journals and he would occasionally farm out papers for post-doc comments. After reading a few of these, I realized most of these people were incrediably isolated from any sense of community outside this limited publishing system. Since I had no way of judging the merit or findings, I was free to simply learn from the papers---and I learned a great deal. Doing this gave me the idea of how to really kick ass in science---as a community a collective. And I am almost certain the same kind of system would work wonders for the humanities and the arts--that is create the public space where such things flourish. Of course, that was Gide's dream and it succeeded beyond his wildest dream. In contrast what a weasle ass little world the US has become.
Turning to a different aspect, the actual layout work, as I learn Freebsd and TeX, I realized much of the old unix system was devoted to creating this technical text world so that it could be used as a publishing system, in conjunction with printing presses like those they were getting rid of at the Center Street location. What a waste. Unfortunately, the only fields that still use TeX or LaTeX are mathematics, physics and astrophysics and part of the old LBL archives where most of this software was developed in the first place (mostly NSF funding). On a centralized campus network, the dvi or postscript files can be downloaded into special machines that produce the film for the offset litho plates that in turn are mounted on the presses for a production run. Alternatively, the same files can be download and read through various unix facilities. If there were a whole system of such archives with the requisite indices and so forth, you do what I used to in the library, in about half the time---which is why these computer based systems were invented in the first place, duh.
I guess its more than ironic to realize that the bare skeleton of public space I saw up at LBL, in the labs, and publishing systems that were being dismantled in the 90s under privatization neoliberal crapolla, that skeleton was all that was left of the once mighty science-military-industrial complex that was so lavishly funded during the cold war to develop the technology to kill people on a vast scale by the millions. At that point what was rising was the great bio-science-pharma-heath-medicine-agri-bizz industrial complex where all manner of patents and wholesale genetic rape of every living thing on the planet was taking its place.
Any way on a side point brought up on this thread about how private pharam-agribizz works is that they recruit people or did, based on their post-doc work---buying the knowledge based directly so to speak. Sometimes they buy whole departments, like Novartis did for a few years after I left.
CG