Publicly funded research should without reservation be free and available to all (if that's what the author chooses). I say that as someone who hopes to publish

Publicly funded research should without reservation be free and available to all (if that's what the author chooses). I say that as someone who hopes to publish within the next 18 months. Not sure it's going to be any good, but it will be free. The big publishers are public parasites that make money off the work of other people and through controlling information and progress. The quicker they go into the dustbin of history the better. My issue is less with the argument and more with the general sentiment. I don't understand how we can get outraged that companies like Elsevier operate this way when it is fundamentally the same closed model that is so prevalent in tech. I don't imagine as an industry we are so self-unaware, contradictory, or (to use a less nice word) hypocritical, but the sentiment doesn't match with the actions of this industry. where does the disconnect come from? We celebrate piracy in this thread, but if these same tactics were turned on almost any company represented on HN, it would not be seen as a virtue.