Hacker News Reader

It cost money to make a publish scientific papers, so why should you be allowed to pirate them?

The headline implies the reason scihub is illegal is because of the content of the papers where this obviously isn't the case.Copyright law applies to papers the same way it applies to music and films and why shouldn't it?

View on HN

Cost is a big part of the problem. The cost of publishing papers online is very small. Sci-Hub is the proof of that.

Yet access to many papers costs about US$35 per paper. Many researchers (including students) can't afford that. Nor can the general public. I understand that none of that income goes to the authors - they don't benefit from their own work. That was the whole idea behind copyright.

The publishing house set-up is a dinosaur.

In most cases research is funded by tax money, the public already paid for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com