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Do you see a reason that, as an author, you wouldn't want your article to be pirated as widely as possible? You get no actual benefit from IEEE making money off of your article, right?

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This is speculation, but perhaps there's a game-theory issue here. If IEEE loses money by people pirating (and you can apply the usual counter-arguments about whether the pirateer would have gone on to purchase it anyway) rather than paying then publishing costs increase to cover that loss, and therefore hurting the authors who must cover that increase in future if they want to publish in the journal again.

A better situation is where the preprint or open access version is available.

> then publishing costs increase to cover that loss, and therefore hurting the authors who must cover that increase in future

WHAT?! Does that mean it's the authors who pay publishers to get their work published? Is that really true? And then publishers also charge readers for what they were paid to publish in the first place?

If so then... I don't even... :)

Yes, this is actually how scientific publishing works.

I think the university insulates the author from the costs you mention. This also assumes that the market for articles is fair and rational, when it's anything but.

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