2 ms·
Also free. That helps. But the sad state of the affairs is that if Aaron Swartz does it, he ends up dead; if Meta does it, everything is fine.
by reddalo 2y ago
Also free. That helps.
But the sad state of the affairs is that if Aaron Swartz does it, he ends up dead; if Meta does it, everything is fine.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoA lot of people would gladly pay. I'm a paying subscriber to Anna's Archive, which vastly improves the experience of that site. (It's borderline unusable without a subscription.) Thing is, the Elsevier/Springer model makes it incredibly difficult to pay them. With single papers or book chapters in the $30-40 range, an afternoon's research can easily cost $600. (Note that the authors and reviewers don't get royalties on this, and the Editor-in-Chief of any given journal usually only makes a small stipend!) There are services like DeepDyve, but they're intentionally gimped and difficult to use, because their user interface is 100% built around preventing you from downloading or screenshotting the papers you "rent"! If the publishers set up a $100/month all-open-access program, and if the experience were at least halfway decent, I'd bet that a lot of people sign up. And that's not cheap!