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Comment by watermanio | Hacker News Reader

There was a good article on the vast money charged by these journals in the Guardian last week. Although the publishers business does seem pretty robust, there are at least winds of change from universities and governments who fund this research that are finally saying enough is enough...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

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Hopefully something charges this time. Last time (i.e. around 2010) the publicity campaign failed. Back then university librarians managed to create some awareness about the extortionate price of journal subscriptions, but that's all they did, prices didn't decrease.

The trouble is, there are certain core journals that are really needed and many crap journals. Subscriptions come in packages, i.e. a library can't choose to keep Cell and get rid of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, they can only cancel Elsevier altogether. That's why the campaign failed last time, there wasn't a critical mass ready to unsubscribe from everything to convince the publishers to get their act together. Maybe this time, with Scihub, things improve.

I predict that Elsevier & friends are going to use their influence on Congress to implement internet filtering at universities to keep Scihub out. It worked for the music/film industry.

Did someone pull the strings at Economist to publish this editorial in order to respond/damage control the Guardian piece? (obviously it's just my speculation but coincidence is also only one of the plausible explanations)

If anyone is interested in a former researcher turned Open Access publisher's observations on the issues: https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896

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