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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Except if I want to buy some piece of academic research, they sell articles for as high at $60. Why aren’t academics complaining about the absurd costs for the public accessing their information?

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Academics don't make money from academic publishing. In fact, they often have to pay exorbitant review fees to journals. There have been many, many HN threads about this part of the the publishing industry.

> Why aren’t academics complaining about the absurd costs for the public accessing their information?

They are. Loudly and consistently. Academics largely abhor the academic publishing industry, but feel trapped by it.

Most academics (at least in Sweden). Get a lot of their articles from their University Library. Scihub is also an option if needed. If those options aren't possible then either request the library to buy it or to do it themselves. Besides it is way less than $43k.

Even then a lot of people are against the high cost

Just email the academic and ask for the paper, it's the journals that are ripping everyone off.

... they are.

They do? Every single academic in the country supports open-access, lobbies their institutions to pay for the costs of open access. Every researcher will send you a copy of their article if you are paywalled and want to read it. And you, like all academics, know about Sci-Hub, so you should do what most academics do and use Sci-Hub to pirate the article to begin with.

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