No, Sci-hub and the arxiv was always an option for people in developing countries.
All that's changed for researchers now is they have to fork over a factor or two or more to publish in the same journals as a few years ago.
All that's changed for researchers now is they have to fork over a factor or two or more to publish in the same journals as a few years ago.
Pretending that things are fine now is dishonest imho. Business practices of the IP industry aren't suddenly a-ok just because you can pirate your way around it and pretend that therefore they aren't harming anyone.
So part of it is the university just needs to figure out how to appropriately reallocate it's resources?
I wonder how often the university employers of article authors pay these publication fees, and if those budgets are going up? (If university library subscription fees are not going down, then that's another sort of mystery to look into).
“submission in some electronic formats qualifies for a publication charge discount (Physical Review Letters) or waiver (Physical Review A, B, C, D, E, Applied, Fluids). Acceptable formats for the discount or waiver are currently REVTeX (preferred), LaTeX, Harvmac, or MSWord”: https://journals.aps.org/pre/authors/submission-faq#discount