[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.