Protohedgehog

Note that the more you know about them, the worse it gets. I wrote a report for Education International last year as part of a global campaign against Elsevier. https://www.ei-ie.org/en/detail/16061/elsevier-the-price-of-...

You make it sound so easy, but if it was, don't you think people will have done it already? Monopolies, vendor lock-in, lobbying, divide-and-conquer approaches, all make moving away to a better system quite difficult.

Public funding agencies should be prohibited from giving away funds and copyrights to private entities with 30%+ profit margins. I cannot understand why this is legal.

Just a note that we have asked the European Commission to investigate Elsevier for abuse of a dominant market position: https://zenodo.org/record/1472045, and also now Education International (32 million members, 400 member organisations) are taking the fight to them through academic unions. https://bit.ly/2PPjwRK

It's not necessarily about reading articles. It's about giving everyone the freedom and opportunity to do so if they wish. You might not want to read them now, but what if you became interested in physics, or a friend of family member became ill? You'd want to know more about these things from the research literature, and the current system denies the vast majority of people that opportunity. You don't even know if articles are any good or useful until you've paid. We recently published a paper that attempts to convey different needs for open access to research here: http://f1000research.com/articles/5-632/v1