• Luke@lemmy.ml
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    9 hours ago

    “People often say to me, ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers. You hardly print anymore. The Web is free. Why do you charge?’” said H. Frederick Dylla, the former director of the American Institute of Physics and board member of the Association of American Publishers. “It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”

    Albert Greco, a publishing expert at Fordham University who is working on a book about scholarly publishing, said those making that argument are forgetting everything they learned or should have learned in economics class.

    “There are costs,” he said. “Does The Washington Post have a paywall?”

    Yes.

    “So is it fair then if some high-school student wants to really follow the Supreme Court and doesn’t have the money to pay?” Greco said. “Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”

    These assholes don’t even have a better reason for fleecing everyone than base greed, and they don’t try to hide it.

    • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      2 hours ago

      I could almost see sympathize when it came to paper publishing. Because the cost to publish was high, and not a lot of people buying. But now with electronic formats, yeah, they are total assholes in the current sense.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 hours ago

      “Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”

      Tautology School Degree. Why not?

    • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      Elbakyan is an immeasurably more virtuous, noble and honorable person than these Dylla and Greco worms.

    • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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      6 hours ago

      The existence of publishers for scientific literature is completely unnecessary in the modern era. They exist only to make profits to continue their existence. They don’t actually provide value anymore when research institutions can just conduct peer review and then let researchers self-publish.

      They create negative value (a bottleneck) by limiting who can access research for just… aggregating and hosting articles.

      • jabathekek@sopuli.xyz
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        5 hours ago

        wouldn’t it be funny if I slapped in a few ssds into an old desktop I found on the side of the road and hosted the entirety of human knowledge from it

    • 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip
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      6 hours ago

      ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers.

      We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.

      Instead, he just takes everything from authors and reviewers for free. Is he living in a different country?

    • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 hours ago

      “Does this for profit news agency require money for information? Then surely academic research needs to require money to get the info as well! Nevermind that public funds are involved with a lot of research initially where news orgs don’t have that, we need to make a profit cuz reasons!”

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 hours ago

      Yeah lmao, that’s the worst possible argument he could give I think

      “Have you forgotten your economics class?” And then compared public research to a private newspaper

      Like, lmao

    • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 hours ago

      economics class

      which is absolute ideology anyhow

      “Does The Washington Post have a paywall?”

      wow, you’re using the everyone else is doing it argument. These are fucking children