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.It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does.- Scholars write the content for free- Scholars do the peer-review for free- All the legacy publishers do is take the content and paywall PDF filesCan you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.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).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.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: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-and-th...1. https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jtj2dzMfklULQipRZt_3xaLoFxU...