Should All Research Papers Be Free?
Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article.<p>It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does.<p>- Scholars write the content for free<p>- Scholars do the peer-review for free<p>- All the legacy publishers do is take the content and paywall PDF files<p>Can you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.<p>Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.<p>There's a comment in this thread that mentions the manual work involved in taking Word files and getting them into PDFs, XML, etc. While that is an issue, which you could consider a technology problem, it definitely doesn't justify the incredible cost of journal content that has been created and peer-reviewed at no cost. Keep in mind that journal prices have risen much faster than the consumer price index since the 80s (1).<p>The future is very clear, academics do the work as they've always done and share the content with the public at a very low cost via the internet.<p>PS. If you want a peek into how the publishers see the whole Sci-Hub kerfuffle, check out this post from one of their industry blogs - the comment section is a doozy: <a href="http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-and-the-four-horsemen-of-the-internet/" rel="nofollow">http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-and-th...</a><p>1. <a href="https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jtj2dzMfklULQipRZt_3xaLoFxU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6143539/fig-increases.0.png" rel="nofollow">https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jtj2dzMfklULQipRZt_3xaLoFxU...</a>