This is also a big reason why I'm few weeks from submitting my masters for inspection, and 90% of my references/sources are from Annas Archive / Zlib. Our uni library, in supposedly rich nordic country Finland, just cant afford all the licenses. Luckily all our professors and researchers are in on the "secret", but its just a fucking joke.

Most of the world economy is on the same fucking joke. Just leeches upon leeches upon leeches... And so few people giving anything usefull to the world. I fucking try, but god damn these useless money leeches in the middle try to make it hard as possible. Fuck. So fucking angry, but what can I do but try to minimize the damages I do on my personal part.

If the research was conducted with public money, it should be freely accessible by the public, change my mind...

Haha, PeNAS

so back in the day we needed publishers for distribution. now with the Internet, distribution is easy. but prices only went up

associate editors and referees are unpaid volunteers. typesetting is also mainly done by the authors. but prices are high because the publisher wants to profit.

there are quite a few high quality journals that are fairly priced and published by non profit publishers. these are the only journals authors should publish in ....

science is meant to be pirated.

Fuck publishers.

also a lot of research work in brazil disallows you to get a second job. you are forced to live with the little money they pay you.

its almost like they don't want there to be research here.

How I sleep after downloading my research papers illegally

And sci-hub paused adding more papers 😞

Given the times I've seen news articles and screenshots of poorly vetted published journals. Surely a free open source publisher managed by the academic community can't be much worse? I also don't know shit about the requirements to actually publish so this is probably a naive take

One should do a study about much these supposedly open access journals are profiting and who are their shareholders and what not

I would like to see this written up for a wider context because it's not just a science problem. The Humanities, Arts, and pretty much the whole campus is the same in this way. It's why I left academia. Universities are set up wrong because employee incentives make it a sort of feudalistic system. All you have to do is work as a professor for a few years and discover it's pretty much the same as grad school. You don't really collaborate with the people you work with every day in person. All your contacts are outside your home campus. Nothing useful for the world happens on the campus. You do that outside of the campus to gain "reknown" and your outside brand gets you cred on campus. Meanwhile, on your home campus, your so-called colleagues do everything they can to block any cross-listing of courses they can because the administration counts the beans. The department needs to generate credit hours. Cross-listing is viewed as bean subtraction.

sighs from Eastern Europe

You'd think that they're using the money for prizes for reviewers or as scholarship prizes. What are they doing with all that money? Hosting a journal can't be that expensive.

Please don't give the overlords ideas. "Minimum wage" as a currency? Talk about dystopian present, damn.

Libgen and Scihub exist for this exact reason. How is it we've arrived at a situation where capitalists are deciding how knowledge is propagated?

Is that 15 weeks of minimum wage or 15 months?

Academic publishing seems like a problem that should be easy to solve. It's a situation where greed is outright making the service worse for everyone, so it seems like a new journal that does things differently (e.g. by not charging researchers) could become wildly successful... So why doesn't that happen? Are there barriers to creating new journals?

Time to start another journal, one not run by antiscience moneygrubbing trashbags!

Luckily there are several tools and scripts to bypass paywalls and also those that redirect to the original publication, when the anti-paywall does not work.

Why isn’t Brazil on the list of countries that have their fees waived? Are they on the “rich” side of the spectrum for that to be considered or is there simply no agreement between Brazilian government/publishers?

Yes, I know this is treating a symptom rather than illness itself, but for the sake of today’s science and not the science of tomorrow, at least such an option should be available.

only option is pay out of pocket

Or, ya know, self publish.