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.
You get no argument from me, Val.
Maybe scientists can wise up to this and self-publish in their own open-source journals in the interests of actually promoting scientific discovery, not just following protocols for resume padding and career ladder climbing.
Assortative matching would predict that like-quality researchers would cluster, reproducing a comparable ranking of open source publications to existing peer-reviewed ones behind paywall.
Heck, if these professors were really interested in the spirit of scientific discovery, they would uniformly require that all universities' tenure assessments give equal weighting in performance reviews to quality-matched open-source and existing traditional journals. The money saved from university subscriptions to useless journal servers would offset at least a good portion of the cost.
Heck, if government recognized this properly as being market failure, it could provide open-source self-publishing software free to academics as a subsidized public good. How much would that cost to develop, relative to the potential benefit associated with increased knowledge dissemination? I'd hazard a guess the cost would be quickly dwarfed.
Scientists? Academics? Are you going to rattle any cages?
