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.

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

And sci-hub paused adding more papers 😞

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

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.

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?

Is that 15 weeks of minimum wage or 15 months?

only option is pay out of pocket

Or, ya know, self publish.

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.