Ask HN: Why do we have to pay to read research funded from public funds?

10 points·arisAlexis··6 comments

How did the academic and especially the medical sector come to a point that studies conducted by university hospitals and phd doctors are behind paywalls when it's a matter of public health?

Is anyone doing anything about it? YC?

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Officially there is a policy that NIH funded research must be publicly available on the NIH repository (pubmed) within 1 year of a papers acceptance [1]. How this remains enforced is a different question. Not sure how relevant it is to other government funding sources. Also, a surprisingly, large amount of academic research is not strictly publicly funded.

[1]https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651419 and many more in recent HN posts...

Because shitty companies like Elsevier still want to stick around even though their purpose was obsoleted by the Internet, and are using their influence to try and achieve that.

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

If there's a particular paper you're interested in, you can usually email the lead author(s) and just ask for a copy. I've never heard of someone saying no, especially since it's as easy as emailing a PDF.

As for the why -- just DuckDuckGo "why is science behind a paywall" and you'll get a million hits, each author giving a slightly tweaked definition of "it's a holdover from the days of publishing in print journals".

Capitalism turns public funding into a way to extract private profits.

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