You underestimate how quickly a motivated person with a solid general education can start to understand specialized texts. In my case, I have recently been diagnosed with a chronic disease that changed my life, and that most of the doctors in my area are surprisingly ignorant about

Thanks to sci-hub, I've been able to access the latest research about my condition, and so have helped my doctors understand and offer me some of the latest therapies (in theory, that should be their job, but most doctors seem fairly uninterested, or else just too busy to care). I've been unable to work much since getting sick, so there's no way in hell I would be able to afford $30-40 a pop for journal articles. Besides, I'm already paying for the research in the form of 20+ years of tax payments.

And there are many people like me out there.

Are you concerned that your unsupervised human trials might harm your mother? Your anecdote makes a point in favor of restricting access.

$30-40+ per article is, effectively, no access. It's ridiculous. Well, it's access for the wealthy and academia I guess.

I read about a lot of stuff, many different subjects, and a lot of the papers by the people I want to read, and articles mentioned in other books and papers, are of this $30-to-view kind. It sounds like that never happened to you? I think this black-and-white elitist 'researchers vs public' idea is a silly model of reality. Even someone who's never read any papers in their life, may one day have some medical, legal, historical, artistic etc need or desire to become better educated in some area, which is prevented. Or was, before SciHub. But that's not an 'egregious inefficiency' so never mind?! That's a long way from As We May Think.

Also the very idea that it's ok to gatekeeper off knowledge that was paid with public funds because you think the general public won't be interested in it is ridiculous and wrong.

LOTS of people regularly read scientific papers - many people in technical fields, people who studied an area of research but are not active researchers, and so on.

I'm in no way saying these services couldn't easily be replicated at a much lower/negligible cost but they do provide a service.

Not necessarily. For-profit publishers today – perhaps more often than not – expect the unpaid volunteer editors of the journal to do any typesetting or copy-editing, and then just send the publisher a camera-ready PDF to print.

Other smart people, with some dedication and effort could learn enough to read scientific journals. People learn to read music or learn other languages. If you wanted to learn science you should have access to the works you helped fund.

So it's not just pedestrians who have problems accessing the most recent research information.

It might be true in some countries but that's certainly not the case everywhere.

This may include scanning old publications, OCR'ing them, and making them available for search and retrieval; a service which wasn't expected when the research was done.

This may include continuing content curation. I have sent corrections to a journal because their system contained incorrect information, such as in incomplete title. In one case they combined two letters to the editor into a single DOI entry, and needed to break it into two. They have staff which can handle those corrections, and those staff need to be paid.

They may also provide addition search capabilities beyond the free ones available from, say, Google Scholar, and they may update the interfaces for improved usability and for better integration with tools like citation managers.

While I don't see how those activities justify the current high prices, I disagree with the idea that public funding for the original research means there should be no additional funding for continued archiving and access.

Realistically, most people won't touch scientific papers. You might get a few people who can wrangle up incredible things from them, but those people would have succeeded in any environment. Most research will continue to be done at major institutions like companies and universities.

But that appeal to the heart is a winning argument, and it's not wrong. Open access in the end is a good thing, even if the arguments for it are stretched, and they are stretched. I don't trust a lot of my own colleagues to bulletproof their papers (get in a graduate course, you'll see how many holes are in most research), the general public with no scientific training is at best limited and at worst dangerous.

It is a natural step, though. Your's won't be a popular question (do we really have to downvote the guy for asking a question, even if you don't like that question?), but it's a good one.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

I believe that specialists in a field are the ones who will actually make use papers. Specialists should have access, that's something I can get behind, but the general public as you say won't make use of research.

I understand what you're saying about appealing to emotion though.

Also consider that of every 200 PhD students, only one ends up with tenure. That means there are a lot of former academics out there.

Many arguments that have wide appeal do end up published as books. no disagreement on your goal, but is it something realistic for much academic work?

Why are century-old obsolete technical limitations taking priority over clear and effective communication?

Also, I am diabetic. Pretty much everything in pop science says to eat complex carbs, and avoid fats and simple sugars. There are a number of papers that talk about the benefits of a low carb and high fat diet, but they're behind a paywall.

So it's more than just a small specialist community that consumes scientific literature.

Diabetic "pop science" says plenty about low-carb high-fat diets, the most famous of which may be Gary Taubes's New York Times article from 2002.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-...