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Comment by killjoywashere | Hacker News Reader

First it was music, then it was movies, Google took books off the table by accident, now journal articles. You can see where this is going: small subscriptions for millions of subscribers world-wide. Amazon Prime, YouTube Red, or Spotify for scientists. My questions: 1) can I as an author get 30% like musicians on iTunes?, 2) will this make science more attractive as a career?

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1) Probably not. People want to produce papers more than people want to consume papers.

2) Also probably not. Because most papers aren't read widely. The folks I know who have things that generate a small drip of royalties (usually licenses from patents) treat it as a nice little bit of fun-money, but it's nowhere near enough to either fund a lab or really change the calculus of "Is this job worth doing" from a monetary perspective.

Especially when compared to "Fuck it, I'll go work for industry."

Based on bibliographic notes alone we can say that for each produced paper, a lot more are consumed.

Most of the references were also in the last paper of the authors, and will almost surreally be in the next paper. (And there are also self citations ...)

I'd probably divide the number of citation in math by 3 and in physics by 5 to discount repetitions.

As for your second question: please no. Of every 200 PhD students, only one ends up becoming a professor. Science is attractive enough as it is, despite pretty much every aspect of it (pay, overtime, job security, etc.) is abysmal.

Professor isn't the only career possible with a PhD.

It depends on the field. It basically is that way for some fields. Those fields are almost like pyramid schemes (not that the topics are worthless, but the economics behind the level of investment simply do not work). Clearly fields like computer science have all sorts of ways to directly use advanced skills outside of academia, but that's not the case always.

Musicians get 70% of retail is on iTunes downloads. (Or rather, the owners of the copyrights do.)

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