No, Sci-hub and the arxiv was always an option for people in developing countries.

All that's changed for researchers now is they have to fork over a factor or two or more to publish in the same journals as a few years ago.

Well, they were always an option, but becoming less so. Increasingly financial aid from the west and trade agreements are bound to "IP protection", meaning the protection of the scientific publishing racket at the expense of scientists and SciHub (among other things).

Pretending that things are fine now is dishonest imho. Business practices of the IP industry aren't suddenly a-ok just because you can pirate your way around it and pretend that therefore they aren't harming anyone.

Presumably university libraries are also forking over much less, since the increased publication fees are replacing drop in subscription fees?

So part of it is the university just needs to figure out how to appropriately reallocate it's resources?

I wonder how often the university employers of article authors pay these publication fees, and if those budgets are going up? (If university library subscription fees are not going down, then that's another sort of mystery to look into).

Page fees are usually paid out of the grant. Some science journals have, in the past, waived page charges for people not supported by grants or institutions, or who just couldn’t pay, sometimes at the cost of slower processing of the article.

I would like to meet one of those journals. Every journal I've published with has been a 'pay first, then we publish' model.

“APCs are waived for authors from developing countries that APS offers free online access to under the SRKS Program.”: https://journals.aps.org/pra/authors#pubcharges

“submission in some electronic formats qualifies for a publication charge discount (Physical Review Letters) or waiver (Physical Review A, B, C, D, E, Applied, Fluids). Acceptable formats for the discount or waiver are currently REVTeX (preferred), LaTeX, Harvmac, or MSWord”: https://journals.aps.org/pre/authors/submission-faq#discount

> That is a new round of FUD from the predatory publishing industry

How do you define exactly "predatory publishing" ? Every journal that is not one of the major monopolistic journal that profits from the work and money of others ?

I call "predatory" the commercial publishing businesses that profit off the need of researchers to publish and their free work, off the free work of reviewers and conference organizers while seeking extortionist subscription prices from the same institutions that employ the aforementioned scientists.

To name and shame: Elsevier, Springer, deGruyter, Wiley, Nature and lots of other smaller ones.