Zero margins. Scientific authors get exactly zero money from academic publishers. In fact, sometimes it's negative money (the journal charges you to publish, i.

Zero margins. Scientific authors get exactly zero money from academic publishers. In fact, sometimes it's negative money (the journal charges you to publish, i.e. if it's open access). Zero or negative. They get exactly zero dollars of that $40-per-article fee. Which is why authors will often GLADLY give you the article for free if you email them. Scihub is in a legal grey area (not really legal, so I can't technically advocate for its use in my position), but in a way it's automating the normal process of asking researchers for a copy of the paper, thus saving the researchers' time. (Researchgate is a more legal version of this, but with much less access to papers.)