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Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> the business of publishing tax-funded research and then selling it to tax-funded institutions has produced the most profitable industry in the world

How is this not illegal?

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I don't see why would it. You can submit papers without an affiliation, so the idea of publishing only tax-funded research is a generalization. That is, these organizations do work by being selective and then selling the collections of that selection process back.

Granted the publishers do work. Even PLoS does work. It's the lack of access that is the problem. $42.50 for an article one of my colleagues at my own US Government institution wrote (random example from this weekend's work, American Journal of Bioethics) is ridiculous.

I thought in most cases the author is free to provide copies of his/her own articles directly? Is it not true that you could just ask your colleague for a copy of what he submitted for publication?

which part should be illegal, the selling of the subscriptions or the buying?

That statement is misleading. Pblishers sell participation badges to the article authors, the authors put these badges in their CV, and when the time comes to ask for money from the governmnet, the gal with the most badges on her chest wins it.

In addition, the authors have the right to upload a preprint (i.e. a copy identical in content) to a preprint server - virtually all journals allow it nowadays - although it doesn't happen.

So, there is in theory no reason why anyone should go to these websites to download a copy. In practice, it is convenient for the parties involved (researchers & funding agencies).

Even outside of research, in most economies there's a lot of money flows that look like this. Visited Europe last year, it's crazy how many of them are both funded by government grants and provide services to the government. Unfortunately curbing that would involve even more regulation making everything worse perhaps.

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