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Comment by HackerThemAll | Hacker News Reader

It is awkward that you have to pay to publish your scientific research, and then your readers have to pay to access it. Knowledge should be freely available to advance humanity. Possibly readers should pay directly to authors for their efforts. Yet we have greedy intermediaries (publishers) that effectively just suppress world's progress.

Projects like SciHub should thrive forever to combat this bullshit.

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You don't have to. The web was created for exactly this purpose. What the journals provide is peer review, curation and trust. Projects like SciHub don't do anything to replace these aspects of traditional publishing.

Peer reviewers are unpaid, curation seems like a problem the internet can solve well, and trust... deriving one's trust from Elsevier or Springer is not great model. Granted, funding is needed to ensure distribution, but multiple billions of dollars in revenue (and even profit) seems excessive for what they provide.

> Peer reviewers are unpaid

Is that bad? How would they get paid if all articles were free?

> curation seems like a problem the internet can solve well

"The internet" isn't anything more than a (supposedly) robust telecommunications network. Anyone can curate anything, but that is meaningless without trust.

> deriving one's trust from Elsevier or Springer is not great model

Any centralised trust model is broken by default. We've had practical web of trust security for decades at this point. But for various reasons nobody will use it. It would be perfect for things like this.

I think we agree that the current system isn't good. In posting, I was working out my thoughts on the P&L for those intermediaries, and the value they provide versus the value they extract. I'm not sure what things should look like, but my conclusion is that selling publicly funded science to publicly funded scientists at a premium seems like quite an inefficiency.

If profit can be extracted - capitalists always choose profit.

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