This situation is a predictable response to avarice. Academic publishing has profit margins higher than Apple's.


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... scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill.


Elsevier and the other big publishers package journals the way that cable companies package channels. You want highly respected journal x? Great! It's part of a package of 78 other journals, including the Journal of Pointless Chemistry Experiments and the Journal of Wishful Thinking. You get all these journals for a $600,000 annual subscription fee (last 12 months of papers in the highly respected journal are embargoed unless you pay for the premium package).

No, I am not making this up.

They routinely charge $40 to $50 for pdf copies of 50-year-old papers.

Open source publishing is putting a big dent in this problem, though as an author, you may have to pay $3,000 to $4,000 to publish your paper. The US government has a policy requiring open-source copies of federally funded research. All this means that about a third of papers are now freely available. But what to do if you work at a place that can't afford $600,000 a year for a single set of journals and you need a bunch of papers behind a paywall? Or a curious gifted kid who might be able to pay $40 each for a few papers, but not $200? Until Sci-Hub came along, it was too bad.

This is the problem with greed in business: they want it all, they want it forever, and too bad for everyone else. Sci-hub is merely a response saying that third thing back to them. And it's not just Sci-Hub: there's an active boycott against one major publisher.

And don't even get me started on the bias toward sensational results, which itself has created an enormous crisis of irreproducibility.