> I'm actually surprised this whole suit is being pursued by a professional society. Closed publications seem to be out of line with the interest of their members.
Not exactly.
I fully recognize that Elsevier and Springer Verlag have behaved so obnoxiously that they make everything I'm about to say sound ridiculous, but nevertheless, here goes.
"If you're not the customer, you're the product."
When I get the latest issue of (say) IEEE Transactions On What I Do For a Living, I want to know that the editors did their best to solicit and round up the best new work on advancing the state of the art in my specialty, and that the manuscripts they received check out and are worthy.
That takes money, because the editors have bills to pay and can't really do this on a volunteer basis. Even though the peer reviewers are volunteers, getting them to volunteer is itself work. And the work starts by filtering the slush out so you're not asking the reviewers to look at stuff that's utter crap.
Advertiser support is not appropriate here. "This issue of IEEE Power And Energy is brought to you by Xformer Corp. (So don't even think about discussing in these pages how our transformers blow up more often than should happen in polite society.""
Author support is even less appropriate, with all due respect to the PLOS line of journals.
And yes, the professional societies try to price subscriptions and downloads so their budget is at break-even, which is why they have an interest in getting subscriptions and payments from as many people as possible, i.e. by not making the PDFs available for free. If everyone in EECS joined IEEE, membership fees would go down, and they could add Transactions access to the standard membership package.
I do still think it's counterproductive to crack down on Sci-Hub. Ultimately, what we need is a micropayments system that makes paying for downloads too seamlessly easy to be worth dodging. If Venmoing for PDFs took less time to set up and use than going to Sci-Hub, this would be moot.