Budding authors face a minefield when it comes to publishing their work. For a large fee, as much as $3,000, they can make their work available to anyone who wants to read it. Or they can avoid the fee and have readers pay the publisher instead. Often it is libraries that foot this bill through expensive annual subscriptions. This is not the lot of wannabe fiction writers, it’s the business of academic publishing.

More than 200 years ago, Giuseppe Piazzi, an isolated astronomer in Palermo, Sicily, discovered a dwarf planet. For him, publishing meant writing a letter to his friend Franz von Zach. Each month von Zach collated letters from astronomers across Europe and redistributed them. No internet for these guys: they found out about the latest discoveries from leatherbound volumes of letters called Monatliche Correspondenz. The time it took to disseminate research threw up its own problems: by the time Piazzi’s data were published, the planet had vanished in the sun’s glare.

It was a 23-year-old reader in Göttingen who saved the day. Using Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Carl Friedrich Gauss calculated the location of what we know today as Ceres. Gauss, who became Germany’s greatest mathematician, and Piazzi shared their learnings freely, but they accepted the need to pay for the work that von Zach undertook. This is the closed-access publishing model.