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Comment by czr80 | Hacker News Reader

> Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit.

Every online company relying on user generated content?

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Yeah, but with Facebook and Reddit, you're not paying a ton of money to have access to journal articles you need to study for your chosen profession. You're just looking at some advertisements in exchange for some funny cat pictures.

One of those may lighten your mood for the day, the other of those advances civilization and the human condition as a whole.

Also you don't pay a lot of money to post to Facebook or Reddit. You do when you publish (Cheapest publication I have was ~$500). Publishing a paper is expensive.

Varies quite a bit by field afaict. In CS, I've never paid to publish in journals, and I think it would be seen as weird. However we do often publish papers at conferences (big conferences like SIGGRAPH, CHI, and IJCAI are possibly actually more prestigious than journals to publish in), and in that case it costs money to attend and register for the conference.

I didn't know that:) In the Life sciences, we tend to pay. We also publish images which are very costly. We have one publication that is going to cost us around $3k to publish as it has a lot of microscopy images.

I don't work for them (in fact, they could be considered a competitor), but check out PeerJ. $99 per author for an article. PLOS ONE also has fee waivers if you really can't afford it.

Is there a legitimate reason why scientific journals still produce dead-trees versions? Why not just publish PDFs? The reader can print if he really must.

and they don't even do proofreading or formatting.

Quora springs to mind: they somehow get knowledgeable and articulate people to take the time and effort to write high quality articles for free.

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