"It seems criminal that a few hundred people at the publishing houses should benefit at the expense of billions' welfare"

To me it doesn't seem criminal. It is criminal, for to keep knowledge in the hands of the few and privileged to the detriment of the majority of all humanity is a crime. But not only does the Industry keep this knowledge to itself, it prevents even those who directly fund it (tax payers in developed countries) from accessing it themselves.

I honestly despise those journals who manipulate the current system for profit, just as I and I believe most anyone, would despise any organization or individual manipulating a system at the expense of the well-being of the many.

And I laude sci-hub and Elbakyan for something I consider a service to humanity.

While it is the scientists who are writing the papers and editing them, the journals provide a valuable service as intermediaries between the scientists. Whether this service is best provided "for free" or for profit is another question. In some fields, the leading journals are already published by not-for-profit organizations such as the ACM, but I am not sure that they are doing a better job than Springer or Elsevier.

In a language that's understandable to the HN crowd, journals:scientists are as VCs:(founders + investors).

What exactly is the valuable service they provide as intermediaries? Why couldn't all taxpayer-funded scientists just publish their (anyway voluntarily peer-reviewed) research on whatever free online platform?

As a taxpayer-funded scientist I publish all of my stuff on arXiv before submitting it to a journal, and it is 100% worthless for my career. If my research is not published in respected journals, other researchers will not bother looking at it, and justly so. Have you tried reading a paper selected at random on arXiv? You'll spend many long hours reading it only to end up realizing that it's garbage (unless you're lucky to realize this from reading the abstract).

Completely agree with your point. But the value here is brought by the reviewing process, which is (at least for CS as far as my knowledge goes) done voluntarily by other researchers, not by the journal itself. So the prestige of particular publishers could easily be shifted towards a free online platform as long as the same people continue to review the publications.

They are extracting rents from research far beyond the value they add to it.

Does ACM sell individual papers? If so, what's the price?

It's about the same as everyone else: about 15 USD per paper, e.g.

https://dl.acm.org/purchase.cfm?id=2756548&CFID=761526954&CF...

They also have a somewhat restrictive licensing on their software:

http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice

This part is kind of weird, as they have a noncommercial clause on their copyrighted algorithms, which makes them non-free.

On a slightly different note, I was somewhat saddened by how the International Lisp Conference talks were recorded but unavailable because the ACM will not allow their publication.

How the hell can that be "non-profit"? Where is the money going? Free conferences in Dubai?

The ACM publishes annual reports with a high level breakdown of their finances. The most recent one is here:

https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/annual-rep...

The finances are on pages 12 and 13. The short version: they're spending money on all the things you'd expect, but they seem to be slightly cash flow positive and have accrued around $100m in net assets.

What I'm wondering about is the economic justification for charging $15 per article copy. Other than "we can", I mean.

The usual "economic justification" for such things is that people are paying it.

In reality, very few people pay the individual article prices. The real market is in site licensing, as it were. The individual article prices are probably set to support the sales story on these institutional access licenses, not the other way around.

I think you can also get access to the ACM library via membership. When I was in college I paid for a student membership, I think its was $25/year or something generally reasonable. Probably a better value proposition than my actual CS degree, not that its a great point for comparison.

That's true. Many of these sorts of memberships are at least a few hundred dollars when you are no longer a student, so they add up pretty quickly (but maybe have tax credits).

Paying $25 annually for membership would be entirely fair. That's far less than site license for even one journal.

But what are criteria for student memberships?

Most definitely, here's a list of journals: http://dl.acm.org/pubs.cfm?CFID=591346815&CFTOKEN=85546644

And here's an article that, for instance, costs $15 to download: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=954342&CFID=591346815&CFTO...

The ACM is paywalled for the majority of the publications it manage.

I found the ACM paywall to be one of the obstacle that limit access of the new wave of the code educators to older results in teaching programming: they are not in the academic sector and lack both knowledge of and access to this enormous amount of papers.

So, in this case, the paywall keep a new generation naive, as they reinvent independently research that have been conducted decades earlier.

I agree with you that knowledge should be accessible to all.

But, do realize that there most certainly is value being contributed by journals who are making you pay. For example, the editorial work, the typesetting, the selection, the whole system, etc. So they do need a paycheck from somewhere.

So, I think this is actually like the common software/music/movies piracy situation... but a lot better!

My (simplified) feelings about piracy are: do it if you're dirt-poor, don't do it if you can easily afford it. By this account, Kanye was a d-bag for pirating.. whatever software he pirated, because he, of all people, should be able to afford it. A starving artist with lots of debts, in my opinion, can't be accused of doing a great moral wrong when he's stealing a thing which has an effective zero marginal cost (arguably). The biggest problem here is that... there do exist people like Kanye who really should pay for things but end up not doing so.

What's different in this scenario is that... I am almost 100% certain that all institutions that should be paying... will be paying! I mean, can you imagine some Harvard or MIT lab skipping payment on the journals? No, that's just not going to happen. The Harvards and MITs of the world will keep paying... the rest -- the public, or schools in suffering areas and nations, who can't afford it as easily, will be able to get it using scihub. It works out wonderfully in this way.

Journals do minimal typesetting, and practically no editorial work. Paper reviews are done by academics, free. Editors are mostly academics, not depending a paycheck from publishers. There is cost, like marketing cost, but none that justifies $35 per article to the general public.

That's either a bad lie, or you don't understand how this works. As a small example: Science, Nature, and various other journals produce high quality videos (like this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv0aU2eKry3kdSTnFa8QAWA ). And they have many in-house designers and editors who do important work like identifying from a sea of work what is important and what is not, etc.

It's neither, I think it's just that different fields operate differently. In CS most papers are published in conferences. Authors do their own typesetting, editing, figure making, etc. Peer review is organized on a volunteer basis by the program chair, who is (as far as I know) not usually compensated for their efforts.

This means we don't get many fancy videos unless we or our university's PR people make them, but it still seems to work fine for getting science done.

Here's the breakdown of the current job postings at Elsevier (not to say that this reflects accurately how the $35 / article is divided up):

* 112 IT

* 10 customer service

* 3 data analysis

* 28 editorial

* 3 accounting

* 4 general MGMT

* 3 HR, 35 marketing

* 18 manufacturing

* 22 product MGMT

* 3 program MGMT

I would really like to see an official breakdown of the cost per article and especially the processing cost paid by authors.

edit: formatting.