[cyrksoft]

What's exactly capitalistic about this? They charge for something they have no property or own. In my experience (and every researcher I know does this) researchers have their own websites where they publish a free pdf version of the research (without the format of the published paper, just a simpler pdf version) or even email it to you if you ask them to (those without a website, for example). I am not sure what exactly is "capitalism" about these journals.

[13415]

They charge shitloads of money to universities for accessing their journals, these fees are so high that e.g. our university is very picky about which "packet" they buy and limit them to institutions on a case-by-case basis.

The copies on the author's pages and in open repositories are obliged to be pre-publication drafts, so you cannot cite them.

In fact, under control of large publishers journals have become fairly inventive about making pre-publication manuscripts unusable. For instance, I recently published in a prestigious journal that had an online editing system so that all final revisions stayed in the system - no author copy of any kind, every proof marked with author name and large watermarks -, and they made lots of small, sometimes unnecessary changes in the very last editing step. They also don't paginate the final versions that are published online first, so you can only know the real final pagination a year or so after the first version has been published online.

[mindslight]

> What's exactly capitalistic about this?

The designation that combinations of words are a form of property that can be owned, which then become assets naturally funneled towards those interested in playing the capital meta game and away from those doing the actual work.

To a scientist, the ability to copyright their paper is a vulnerability. Get rid of the concept of imaginary property and there is a lot less for Elsevier to demand from them.

[rusk]

> What's exactly capitalistic about this?

Squeezing as much profit as possible for shareholders while externalising costs. It’s a poster child when you think about it!

[_pfxa]

> They charge for something they have no property or own.

A bearded man calls this "surplus". Scientific journal business is the pinnacle of capitalism, what every company strives to become, including the ones fellow HN people here work at and start up.