Gabe Newell of Valve asserted something very similar:
> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/28331-remove-annoying-boxe...
I'd guess those sites are two orders of magnitude smaller than Steam, but a quick search reveals G2A has 700 employees and 16 million customers, so they can't be doing too bad. If access truly was the problem than these sites wouldn't exist.
I don't know. Paying $25 or $50 for an article, just to see if it contains something useful is a lot ... And with the realization that the research was funded by tax dollars, that price becomes absurd.
As far as I know you can't get a refund if you don't like an article, but I may be mistaken. If you had that option, paying for a journal article might be slightly more palatable.
The quickest legal way to get a copy of a paper that isn't already accessible as a pre-print is to email the author(s). Usually they don't mind. Hint: email the student, not the prof and you're more likely to get a reply. You can also do this via ResearchGate.
I use this Library Genesis search page as portal to Scihub's papers, it's amazing being able to get just about any paper ever, even totally obscure ones from 70 or 100 years ago. I do check Google Scholar first - a lot of recent papers are available online from academic sites, and it's a great way of discovering author home pages.
EDIT: blame the academic management who gives the money to the publishers. This way the publishers will go away to greener pastures.
If powerful researchers cared, they wouldn’t review for journals they don’t like. Obviously the benefit from doing the reviews is bigger than their preference of Open Access.
Researchers don't usually benefit from doing peer review: they don't get paid for it, and it eats time they could spend doing research. It's more of a sense of duty they have that they're "supposed" to do those reviews, and I can't really fault them for that.
(Though I would very much encourage them to only review for fully Open Access journals, and respond to review requests with invitations to submit the work to those journals.)
Edit: - sorry, I missed the sense of duty. Thanks for pointing it out below. - added don’t
And again, I can't fault them for that.
(I assume you meant to say "don't benefit"?)
Until the appearance of the notion of open peer-review, the reviews were not public and thrown away by the editor after the publishing decision.
Concerning the sense of duty, nobody stops anybody to review a work and post it somewhere publicly accessible. However, that's rare to see.
So if you don't review for closed-access venues (which I try to do), you are pressured into not publishing there: and not publishing in closed-access venues is difficult as most papers are collaborations, and usually your co-authors do not share your convictions.
Can't you just publish in two journals then?
I think why people review is: -You should be reading more papers anyway and we like doing it, so why not take it as an obligation? -I assume that eventually it helps one to get selected to be an area chair or something along those lines.
When it comes to subscriptions: academic libraries, under pressure of academics. (And in this case, a group of German libraries finally refused to do so.)
When it comes to disproportionally high publishing fees, however, academics do have something to say, because they can often choose to publish somewhere with lower fees. However, that's not really an option as long as their career progression is determined by which journals they publish in. Thus, I think part of the cause there is those who use journal names as a criterion when judging e.g. grant applicants.
Where are these researchers who pressure the academic libraries to buy subscriptions? I never saw them, except if they are in the management.
If we were to speak in market terms, well, publishers are private entities driven by the market forces, right? So in market terms the clients (researchers) manifest a strong preference for other products than those offered by the publishers. Why do they still exist? Does not make any sense, except if we recognize also that the market is perturbed by the fact that somebody still buys their product and forces the clients to consume and to produce it.
I suspect they do have much to lose.
Scientists can publish in whatever journal they please. The problem is that if they publish in most open sources journals (there are exceptions), they aren't counted as top tier and it hurts their career.
The problem isn't academic administers demanding publication in recognized journals. Its that they charge steep prices in the first place.
But open source means that the work can be copied freely - which leads to marginal costs of near 0 €$.
The argument about how much money it's worth to pay for that is another discussion entirely.
Careful! Even the data on which journals are "high impact" is now proprietary.[0]
No, of course it ought not to be this way.
[0] https://www.scirp.org/journal/Journalcitationdetails.aspx?Jo...
The future of making money from journals could potentially lie with curation: "these are the papers you need to read this month" with links to open-access papers. Indexing and search that exploits that curation also comes to mind: "these are the papers you should read while researching your problem."
The biggest problem that open-access is going to cause is volume. Although, that been said, that's an existing problem (though far less pronounced) in the Oldenburg model due to bad science.
Scientists (and lay people) already have access to excellent tools for this kind of thing. Pubmed provides functionality for performing automated and regular searches of their basically complete index of biological literature. https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2013/11/14/setting-up-...
If you can afford it everyone should send a few bucks to the bitcoin address donation jar on the Sci-Hub site (1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM - but don't take my word for it) so that Elbakyan can keep developing cool stuff like that.
And the fact that requests for Elsevier stuff have "not increased correspondingly" implies that using Sci-Hub has become routine and unremarkable.
Well, Unpaywall works pretty well, and is actually legal: https://unpaywall.org