[dnomad]

Yeah, everything you said is ridiculous.

Journals are very much a profit center for the publishers. Scientific journal publishing is a wildly profitable business[1][2][3] and it is not all the clear that these profits are commensurate with journal quality. They are almost certainly monopoly rents. And the idea that membership fees pay for the journals is also silly. It's well known that it's institutions who pay the outrageous subscription fees for the journal that are actually powering this racket.

The interesting point here is that Sci-Hub isn't really a threat to the publishers. Like with most piracy it's not clear that the people using Sci-Hub would purchase the papers if Sci-Hub weren't available. And no matter what the publishers can always count on those fat institutional subscription fees. And that's what this is really about. The ultimate danger of Sci-Hub is that it undermines the very idea of a journal. Individual scientific papers become the unit of trade and people will take those papers on an a la carte basis. SciHub, if it were left alone, would unbundle science publishing and you'd see a drastic fall in profits.

This is all about money and protecting a wildly profitable business model. The idea that this is about supporting editors is ridiculous.

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-profits-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

[3] https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier...

[ocschwar]

> Journals are very much a profit center for the publishers.

For Elsevier, Springer, WIley, yes.

For IEEE? For ACS? For AIP? Not so much.

> nd it is not all the clear that these profits are commensurate with journal quality

THey're not. I shouldn't have to pay $35 dollars for an Elsevier PDF when Elsevier didn't even have the decency to spend some of that money on copy editing to help authors who don't speak good English.

But I should pay a price. Because the alternative is for someone else to pay, someone who does not have my interests at heart.

[gliboc]

Since when do you need to pay just to download a PDF ? Just remember there's peer to peer, and that the web is not a big black box where you can only deal with giant companies and their websites - there's freedom in it too.

Also: I think your attitude is quite symptomatic of a certain laziness of the research community, which has helped these counterproductive monopolies to rise and strive. Get angry, for once, because this is getting ridiculous.

[s17n]

If the value that the journal is providing is curatorial, then that's what they should charge for - give the papers away, charge for the table of contents.

[Vinnl]

> The interesting point here is that Sci-Hub isn't really a threat to the publishers.

I'm not sure if you can say that. Consortia of universities in both France and Germany have recently decided not to renew their contracts with one of the big publishers, and although it's hard to pin down to what extent motivations contribute, one could very well make the case that they have been able to do so because they have less pressure from academics to retain subscriptions - thanks to Sci-Hub.