Paying $30 to merely look at a paper that may or may not be valuable is ridiculous no matter how you slice it.

You aren't meant to pay the $30, you're meant to be inside the firewall at an institution.

And that excludes 99% of taxpayers.

Correct, but I think people are getting hung up on the price and rent-seeking aspect. The price is a farce. Really, what's happening is the restriction of knowledge to the ivory towers (and their VPNs).

But why is the price a farce? Why not make it some nominal amount? Universities will still buy subscriptions.

> It costs some money to get a DOI

Can't be too much, seeing as I can put a semi-unlimited number of PDFs up on Figshare and get DOIs for them for free.

IIRC it's about a dollar a piece.

A number that points to a URL costs a dollar.

At 4k per DOI, you can store 1/4 million of them per GB. They are basically MAC addresses for documents.

I agree there is value added by curation. But today, academic publishing is an industry worth over $10b, and they don't actually pay for the original access or license of the content or the editing and peer-review. Publishers do add value but not to the extent of the cost that's passed on to the public today.

> content aggregators and indexers, or curators

This is an active Machine Learning task in a lab at my university. Given the kind of progress they are making, I don't see publishers finding much monetary value in this task in the future.

I'm not entirely sure about that. But luckily there is an easy way to find out.

All we need to do is give Sci-hub free reign to publish scientific articles, and see what happens.