At least for publicly funded research, there is no need for anyone to pay. Normally, the theory of copyright is that a creative person has to put food on the ta

At least for publicly funded research, there is no need for anyone to pay. Normally, the theory of copyright is that a creative person has to put food on the table, so they need to be paid. I acknowledge this is a tough problem in the case of actual full-time authors and musicians. But researchers are ALREADY paid by grants, certainly not (lol) by sales of their manuscripts. Want to know why academic publishing has high margins? Because they get their product for free, including even editing and reviewing services. However, academics do sometimes sell books. It is actually much closer to theft to download an academic book than an article because the money does go to the author.