| the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free note, though, that scientists are not paid to edit journals nor peer-review ar

| the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free note, though, that scientists are not paid to edit journals nor peer-review articles in them; the publishers collect their cut simply for hosting the article on a website (and printing physical copies, but basically nobody uses them anymore.) If the publishers were more honest, and allowed people to download papers for the cost of the bandwidth plus a small contribution towards a sysadmin's salary, say 20 cents, and charged the full $10 wack for physical subscriptions/prints, we would have app-store economics and much, much less of a problem. Of course, people with a monopoly don't tend to reduce their prices voluntarily (apart from Amazon..) and full, free, open access (at least for publicly funded research) is a very reasonable demand.