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You are incorrect, at least for my branch (biology), and the traditional publishers like Elsevier, and well-known journals like Science, Nature, or PNAS: Publi

You are incorrect, at least for my branch (biology), and the traditional publishers like Elsevier, and well-known journals like Science, Nature, or PNAS: Publishing in such a journal does not cost money. It also doesn't pay the authors. Only the readers pay for the journal subscription. Then about 15 years ago, a movement started to invert this process. This is called Open Access. Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed, and it is published with a copyleft license, free to access by the public. In the last years, traditional journals have started similar offerings, sometimes graduated (i. e. you pay only a little, and the article is embargoed for a year). Sci-Hub is attacking this problem with technology. That is the second-best solution only. It would be much better if the scientific community could throw their weight behind legal Open Access publishing. That's because there simply are costs involved in the review process, even if the reviewers as well as the authors are not paid. Copyediting, infrastructure, coordination, public relations, data retention, and other work that goes into publishing is done by full-time employees. As one point of reference: PLOS One, the largest Open Access publisher, charges around $600 for a publishing a manuscript. That's a non-profit, and it represents the best current effort to manage this process.

Vinnl 9y ago
> Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed Note: it's not necessarily the case that the author pays. For example, the Open Library of Humanities [1] is funded by contributions my academic libraries, and is thus both free to read and to publish in. Something that's also referred to as Open Access (the "green" variant - I wrote about the different flavours at [2]) is when authors post a version of their article elsewhere, e.g. at their institution or on ArXiV. The confusion is common though: there are lot of terms, and publishers have been exacerbating it by co-opting the terms (which I wrote about at [3]). [1] http://openlibhums.org/ http://openlibhums.org/ [2] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-cf6662565ecd https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c... [3] https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-when-they-say-9dd67447a50b https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-w...

Vinnl 9y ago

> Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed Note: it's not necessarily the case that the author pays. For example, the Open Library of Humanities [1] is funded by contributions my academic libraries, and is thus both free to read and to publish in. Something that's also referred to as Open Access (the "green" variant - I wrote about the different flavours at [2]) is when authors post a version of their article elsewhere, e.g. at their institution or on ArXiV. The confusion is common though: there are lot of terms, and publishers have been exacerbating it by co-opting the terms (which I wrote about at [3]). [1] http://openlibhums.org/ http://openlibhums.org/ [2] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-cf6662565ecd https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c... [3] https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-when-they-say-9dd67447a50b https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-w...