
Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science - kasbah
http://sci-hub.io/
======
smanzer
Previous HN discussion (article has neat details of how sci-hub works):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074638)

~~~
dang
There was another shortly before that:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070192](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070192).

We're bending the rules not to treat the current post as a duplicate, but the
community interest seems stronger than usual.

------
nokya
I am happy she is doing this. The price that paywalls are charging for
accessing research papers is unacceptable: the money does not flow back to the
researchers, nor to the institutions. Most of the paywalled research has been
sponsored by taxpayer money and hence should be publicly accessible or at a
very low "maintenance fee".

~~~
mgr86
I work at a small academic database as a developer. We charge a pittance
compared to what a lot of the larger players in this market do. And I'm
conflicted.

We are a registered non profit, and are actively losing money. Developer
costs, of which there are only two. Building costs--I also shovel snow!,
marketing costs, hosting costs, and much more. We have the workload where we
would benefit from a staff 3 times the size. Currently we are at 12. Years ago
we had a fully functional publishing operation too.

But here is the thing. These open access places often are pay to publish. This
is built into many grants today. Publishing costs. But not so much in the
field I'm in. The social sciences. So sure, the result of that work should be
open access. I just cannot help thinking this takes away from what you could
be paying one more lab or research assistant.

a lot of these pay walled sites are struggling to survive as library budgets
dwindle. Maybe there isn't much room left for the little players. Many are
bought up or have folded over the last 20 years.

~~~
dougmccune
This is a social sciences problem, not a large player vs small player problem.
At Sage, which is one of the largest social science publishers, we also lose
money on social science OA publishing. We've tried for years experimenting
with different APC prices and have struggled to figure out how author pays
will work in the social sciences. Shoot me an email (details in profile) if
you want to chat about this stuff more. It's rare to find someone with
experience doing social science OA publishing on HN!

------
travjones
I've used sci-hub a few times. It's a little buggy and not every article can
be accessed, but it works well enough to try when I'm not on campus.

$30 to read a single article is ridiculous anyway and presents a barrier to
scientists who don't have, can't afford, or don't want to pay for access. I
hope sci-hub stays up and improves for some time.

~~~
Cyph0n
If you're a student, your university likely has a proxy service that allows
you to access journals from anywhere using your credentials.

My previous uni gives access to alumni for life, so I can access journals for
free from wherever.

~~~
r3bl
And what are people outside of the U.S. supposed to do?

~~~
secure
Agreed. I studied in Germany, and none of the academic institutions I know of
make papers accessible to alumnis. For students, sure, but for alumnis? Never
heard of it.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
The local hack: get a lifetime membership at the uni computer club. This gets
you a shell account on a computer inside the uni network, and Rob's your
uncle. Lifetime cost is about $100 here, and that money goes to a good cause.

~~~
krisdol
My uni didn't have any of that. YMMV

------
korginator
Elsevier made more than 3.5 billion dollars in revenue last year. They are
trying everything possible to destroy open research. They were behind three
bills in the US congress to prevent universities from providing access to pre-
publication research. This is research that's been paid for by taxpayer
dollars.

Companies with attitudes like Elsevier need to be buried.

------
ChuckMcM
It paints a bulls-eye on her back and its use of the term "piracy" to "free
knowledge" doesn't flow well in western sentiments. While I get that the
"booty" she is stealing are the fees that the journals would like you to
charge, the acts she are creating are more like a librarian letting people
check out books without a library card because she has an infinite supply of
said books.

I am hoping that the rent-seeking behavior of the science journals can be used
as the canonical example of how copyright can harm the common good.

By endorsing and upholding this egregious use of copyright, our elected
officials are clearly causing more harm than good, and the perversion of the
spirit of copyright, that an _author_ is granted a temporary monopoly so that
they might recover some of their investment, portrays this use as indentured
servitude at best, and outright theft at its worst.

So while I don't think anyone is really "harmed" because Disney won't release
the original Cinderella or employs measures to keep it from being copied. It
is very much the case that by creating this barrier to scientific research, a
person or group who might change the world in a positive way if they had
access, is perhaps even unaware that there is relevant work that they cannot
get access to. That is definitely a harm in my opinion.

So I hope that the narrative here, which has been dominated by big media for
so long, might get some interjection of a more nuanced understanding of why
copyright exists, and how to craft laws that embrace that spirit, rather then
the rent-seeking interests of the people who live off the work of others.

~~~
leereeves
The narrative on copyright has been dominated by big media because _every_
political narrative has been dominated by big media and big money.

Those of us who get information from relatively unfiltered and uncontrolled
sources via the Internet have long had a different perspective on copyright
than those who don't.

I too hope that big media's control of the conversation is coming to an end -
but they won't lose that control without a fight.

------
userbinator
A _long_ time ago (even before Aaron Swartz), when I was still familiar with
the active and rapidly growing filesharing community of the time, I vaguely
remember reading about an effort by some of the "ebookers" to plant proxies in
various universities' networks that would perform much the same function. I
wonder what eventually became of it besides the large paper torrents that
appeared, but I wouldn't be surprised if SciHub was related to that in some
way. Back then, systems were far more open (as opposed to secured), and
something like that was easier than it is today.

~~~
kanzure
> an effort by some of the "ebookers" to plant proxies in various
> universities' networks that would perform much the same function

Yep they did that, it's called ezproxy.

[https://github.com/kanzure/ezproxy-
urls/blob/master/urls.txt](https://github.com/kanzure/ezproxy-
urls/blob/master/urls.txt)

scihub uses this AFAIK.

------
smanzer
Good for them. For the last article that I published, the publisher "value
added" consisted of highlighting all the all-caps names in my document and
asking me to define them as acronyms. Literally the only thing they did, and
it wasn't even right.

~~~
tmalsburg2
Oh, I get so much more out of the publishers: 1.) Long waits during which I
worry that I'm going to be scooped. 2.) Lots of typos because Elsevier
outsources printing to people who don't speak proper English. 3.) PDFs that do
not render correctly in some PDF viewers.

~~~
MorbidPenguin
Got a source for #2?

Funnily enough, I was just reading an article from the journal SYSTEM
(Sciencedirect/Elsevier) yesterday. Very prestigious journal in my field, but
it was littered with typos and mistakes - I figured surely it couldn't be the
work of the two authors.

------
bpg_92
Welp, I used to get books, papers and software from non-legal sources when I
was in undegrad, because I just couldn't afford it, now that I make some money
I buy most of this stuff. The thing is, without all those resources in the
past I couldn't have made it to where I am now. Just my 2 cents.

~~~
coliveira
Kudos to you, there is little respect these days for personal decisions in the
area of information access. Pirating information is wrong, doesn't matter how
you twist it. There is big difference between creating and promoting free
content (great) and trying to break the law to access content that already
exists and is subject to copyright law. After all, requesting payment is a
deal between publishers and writers. By pirating copyrighted works you're not
just breaking the right of publishers, but also the rights of millions of
small content creators.

~~~
logicrook
What do you do of researchers that pirate their own books, and tell you never
ever to buy their books, but go to libgen? I have met at least 5 world-class
scientists say that "because I don't do any money on it anyway", "it's a
scam", and "I wrote this book to be read". And tell "it's wonderful to imagine
that this poor student read my book, and she was afraid to say she downloaded
it illegally"...

"Piracy" is a very nuanced subject, depending on what/who you are talking
about.

~~~
coliveira
There is no nuance there, these people had a personal choice of publishing
their books through a traditional publisher and decided for that. It is just a
tradeoff that you need to honor. Maybe next time they will just self-publish
and have a book that is truly free without the need of pirating.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
We have no real choice. Self-publishing means that the book doesn't count at
all in the CV for grant applications, tenure applications, etc. Only the very
top scientists that no longer have to fight for all these things can afford to
make that "personal choice". For the rest, it's suicidal.

I also have a book at a major publisher, with an outrageous price, and when I
saw it "pirated" I only felt joy at the fact that more people will get to read
it and thus my work is more meaningful. And I also downloaded it myself,
because I actually didn't have it in PDF, only in physical form.

~~~
coliveira
I have published academic books like you, and I never had a problem with this
once I understood the consequences of traditional publishing. These books are
cataloged in good libraries and available in Amazon. If people don't have
money they can go to a library and get a free copy. The day I want a book
freely available in the web I will just write one and post it on in my web
page. I like the idea that authors have the option to go one route or another.
Pirating books doesn't enter into this equation.

~~~
alextgordon
Going to a library and getting a free copy is _exactly_ what people are doing.
The library is online, freely accessible without discrimination.

Since when have we asked authors permission to add their book to a library? In
many places (including the US) if you publish a book it is _mandatory_ to
submit it to a library.

~~~
coliveira
I have never seen an illegal library, have you? Don't try to confuse a
respectable institution with pirate web sites that didn't ask permission to
anyone to do their illegal thing.

~~~
amatic
What is the difference, asside from someone deeming copying 'illegal'?

~~~
coliveira
There is nothing illegal about copying per se, as long as there are no
provisions against it. This is a basic principle of human society. For
example, there is nothing illegal about walking without shoes, as long as
there is no regulation preventing it as it's the case at some government
offices. Your reasoning is just trying to throw away our society principles to
justify your behavior. My main contention is not that we shouldn't have free
information, but that it is unethical to disregard existing laws just because
you don't like them.

~~~
amatic
There is nothing unethical in braking the law. It is illegal to disregard
existing laws, ethics is a different matter. There were many racist, sexist,
oppressing laws in the past that we consider unethical today, and may even
celebrate people who broke those unethical laws in protest to authorities and
'the society'.

~~~
coliveira
True, there are situations where breaking the law is the ethical thing to do.
However, you are trying to put access to a copyrighted book at the same level
as fighting against sexism and racial oppression. Unless you can show that
these situations are closely comparable (little clue: they're not), you're
just creating an excuse to avoid following laws that don't benefit yourself.

~~~
amatic
In the case of copyrighted books or research papers, it could be a matter of
life and death for the user, if we are talking about access to various types
of medical research, for example.

~~~
coliveira
Research papers in medicine are written for specialists, who already have
access to them by means of employment. I don't know how access to that
literature can save lives otherwise. Even if that was the case, it is a very
far fetched way to prove that you need generalized civil disobedience with
regard to copyright law.

~~~
amatic
In a lot of countries in the world, medical institutions or individuals don't
have enough money to pay for access to research and books (lib-gen, the sister
project of sci-hub also serves pirated books). And I agree, that might not be
a proof we need civil disobedience in general (with regard to copyright law),
but I think it does show that copyright law doesn't work well for medical
research. I think similar could be proved for other areas covered by copyright
law, but that would be a long discussion.

------
yason
Is there a tarball of the data somewhere that one could download, redistribute
and host somewhere (on the darknet, assumedly)?

~~~
cfcef
There are occasional torrents, AFAIK. Hope you have 10tb of free space handy.

~~~
dhj
It is absolutely mind blowing to me that you can purchase that amount of
storage with 20% to spare for around $500 these days. 12TB, $498 :
[http://www.amazon.com/Red-Desktop-Hard-Disk-
Drive/dp/B00LO3K...](http://www.amazon.com/Red-Desktop-Hard-Disk-
Drive/dp/B00LO3KR96)

~~~
userbinator
Or around $120 if you just want to archive the data and use tape:

[http://www.tapeandmedia.com/quantum-lto-6-tape-ultrium-
tapes...](http://www.tapeandmedia.com/quantum-lto-6-tape-ultrium-tapes.asp)

The drive isn't cheap though, but tape is still the cheapest media for long-
term archival storage.

------
Fizzadar
Great to see a massive middle finger to the journal system. It's a disgrace
and has to stop. Unfortunately I fear sites like this might entice more
stringent protections for future journal published articles. The war
continues.

------
peterhuston
In Norway there is free access to NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, Annals of Internal Medicine
and the Lancet (2 month delay). UpToDate, BMJ Best Practice and McMaster Plus
is also free. See [http://www.helsebiblioteket.no/om-
oss/english](http://www.helsebiblioteket.no/om-oss/english) for information
about all included resources. You need to access these resources from a
Norwegian IP to get access. From abroad, this can f.ex. be done through Tor if
you define only exit through a Norwegian exit node.

------
vixen99
[http://www.freefullpdf.com/#gsc.tab=0](http://www.freefullpdf.com/#gsc.tab=0)
is another useful site if you're a lone researcher who doesn't have taxpayers'
money funding your literature search and can't afford (in some cases) $30-$40
to look at a published paper.

~~~
aw3c2
Surely that's the same corpus?

------
slantaclaus
This is what Aaron Swartz was trying to do, right?

~~~
DennisP
Allegedly. All we actually know is that he downloaded a large number of
articles.

------
yetanotheracc
Speaking of moral courage, how does one contribute institutional login
credentials to sci-hub?

~~~
aargh_aargh
Only guessing here - you don't provide login credentials, you provide a proxy
host within the university IP range as IP-based authentication is still the
most commonly used method for licensed databases.

------
tim333
May it continue. Perhaps science can go the way music has where in practice
you can see most stuff for free.

~~~
collyw
At least some of the time that does happen (not nearly as much as it should
IMHO). I moved from one scientific institute to another, and would often get
requests from friends in the first place asking if I was able to download a
paper for them.

------
Eudyptula_minor
As a student who is studying to become a Theoretical Mathematician, I hope
Sci-hub stays open for many years ahead. In Finland, we have pretty good
access but only if one is a student. Mathematics is so interconnected, that
removing paywalls and any obstacles could help uncover breakthroughs by
combining ideas from other fellow Mathematicians. I hope UN exercises Article
27 of Human Rights and aligns itself on the right side of history in order to
better Science and to encourage curiosity in today's minds and definitely
tomorrow's! Pardon my English. Thank you.

------
drethemadrapper
There is another service in the pipeline. I came across it very recently; it
is in a public-beta phase. It appears to focus on providing access to all
digital libraries and specifically serving the third-world or developing
countries, mostly in Africa. It has got a different (business) model and uses
some advanced technologies for provisions of the articles. Given that they
intend subscribing to the publishers, there is no doubt that they will remain
in business for as long as the publishers themselves exist.

The projects like sci-hub.io, library.no and libgen are highly commendable. It
is no news that the third-world countries are destabilized by war, economic
sanctions, e.t.c. perpetuated by the world powers thereby making them re-
prioritize (access to) their resources. And it is not surprising that
webrtc/p2p related services are often times blocked in the first world
institutions with access to articles from those digital libraries. Such
technologies/protocols/tools are defined/shaped (at standardization meetings -
IETF, W3C, e.t.c.) by big corporations in order to preserve their own product
offerings.

------
dineshp2
Sometimes we have no option but to break the law until what is considered
_illegal_ is made legal.

Storing research papers behind paywalls is absolutely ridiculous. The law
literally prevents the development of science.

Having personally seen people benefit directly(for purposes of research) from
this initiative solidifies my whole hearted support for sci-hub.

------
max_
How is this diffrent(better) from [http://arxiv.org](http://arxiv.org) ?

~~~
gavazzy
Arxiv is by its nature open access; Arxiv does not charge for access.

On the other hand, the articles that this site hosts require payment to
access. The journals typically charge $30 / article, or roughly $2,000 / year
subscription.

Note that for both the open access or paid journals, researchers do NOT
receive any compensation when users download articles. That is, despite the
research being mostly paid by taxpayers, a PRIVATE company receives
compensation for the work done by the researchers. Not only that, but the
researchers have to PAY a publication fee, and that fee is higher if they want
to allow open-access.

~~~
max_
How come all papers i have come across at the arXiv are readily downloadable
as PDF?

~~~
Blahah
Because the arxiv is a place that hosts free pre-prints. By contrast, sci-hub
is a way to get normally expensive articles for free. Arxiv stuff is already
free.

------
srean
Hope widespread knowledge about its existence does not kill it.

~~~
oxplot
[http://libgen.io/](http://libgen.io/) which archives the sci-hub's newly
accessed papers distributes the copies through BitTorrent. Libgen itself is
also mirrored in multiple locations. Even if Sci-hub is taken down, it
shouldn't take long for another to pop up.

~~~
petra
They encrypt their torrents, so it's pretty useless.

~~~
mynewtb
What makes you think that? If the filenames confused you, those are checksums.
The metadata is available as database.

------
derpadelt
So ordinary people may finally read my papers with reasonable effort? Sounds
like an improvement. I am not in the academic content distribution industry
though.

------
spacefight
Looks like it is piping the queries over to scholar.google.com - getting only
timeouts right now though.

~~~
bnegreve
It uses scholar as a search engine, but then it replaces the links in the
results. e.g.

    
    
        http://link.springer.com/link-to-paper
    

becomes:

    
    
        http://link.springer.com.sci-hub.io/link-to-paper
    

As far as I can tell, it works for some articles.

~~~
aldanor
Just use DOI of the article, then it's instant and bypasses Google search

------
bhouston
So what is the strategy once Springer starts getting their domains taken down?
With torrents this was never a big deal once there was the DHT - it didn't
matter which search engines where taken down or which trackers, the torrents
lived to see another day.

This website at this stage seems particularly easy to take down as it is a
centralized weak link.

Centralized services work great when they are legitimate: Netflix, Spotify,
but decentralized work best when they are not legal.

~~~
Blahah
Sci-hub isn't going anywhere:

1\. The data is stored via lib Gen as torrents (for the PDFs), and a metadata
database that is mirrored by hundreds of people.

2\. In case of a domain takedown the site can be resurrected at a new domain
very quickly - as recently happened when the sci-hub.org domain was taken down
after Elsevier sued the Sci-Hub founder.

3\. There's an onion site, which can't be disrupted by a centralised domain
service.

------
dbcooper
There is very little innovation from academic publishers. Most don't even
offer a single download that includes the paper and supplementary materials.
E-book files are non-existent.

Very expensive publications, like Nature Biotechnology, should at the very
least provide a single download (preferably epub) of each issue.

------
justinclift
Wonder what the size of the data set is so far?

Likely TB's?

~~~
vortico
The total size of the torrents are around 38-40 TB.

~~~
justinclift
Wow, that's larger than I was expecting.

Um, is there a source for that info? Didn't see it in the referenced article.
:)

~~~
oxplot
I don't know where vortico's getting his/her stats, but you can calculate it
yourself from the [http://libgen.io/](http://libgen.io/) , where sci-hub.io
stores the newly accessed papers [1]. They have torrent archive of all the
materials since 2011.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-
Hub#Website](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Website)

------
treenyc
Nice. Does anyone know if there is something equivalent to this much like the
SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
[http://www.ssrn.com/en/index.cfm/mjensen-20th/](http://www.ssrn.com/en/index.cfm/mjensen-20th/)

Where you can perform full text search on all the papers?

------
amelius
Server seems down (?)

Also, isn't this better done over bittorrent?

------
thecourier
in memoriam: Aaron Swartz

------
lmgayosso
Brain Aggregates: An Effective In Vitro Cell Culture System Modeling
Neurodegenerative Diseases.

------
iabacu
Can we download only single articles, or can we download the whole 40M+
collection?

------
pknerd
While searching it goes to Google Scholar. Am I missing something?

~~~
germanier
They replace the links with their own, giving access to papers a plain Google
Scholar search wouldn't.

------
Rainymood
(1) Isnt this illegal?

(2) How do they get access to those papers?

~~~
smanzer
(1) Yes. In USA anyway. Creator is not in USA, however. (2) Academics donate
their institutional login credentials to the site.

~~~
ikeboy
Do you know how I would go about donating my student access to the site? Do I
need to give them my login, or can I run a program on my computer that logs in
and downloads without giving anyone else the password?

------
cyphar
I didn't know that you could raid ships using a website(!).

In all seriousness, the act of "sharing the collective knowledge of mankind
publicly" isn't morally equivalent to attacking ships and killing people. We
should stop using terms that are clearly propaganda created by the film and
music industry to try to muddy the waters.

~~~
njharman
I agree completely. We should also start owning the term and framing the
debate around it. Cast it in positive anti-establishment terms. Like pirate
radio, Robin Hood, V4vendetta. Lone, beleaguered hero(s) fighting for the
peoples against tyrannical and oppressive regimes.

~~~
krapp
What might help is if someone started a file sharing site and named it after a
place where pirates hung out and incorporated a pirate ship and the word
"pirate" into their logo.

Then maybe if it became popular these so-called "pirates" could cast off the
shame of being tarnished by an image they clearly don't embrace at all.

~~~
nine_k
I heard about a certain site named "The Pirate Bay". They sort if got some
publicity, but a positive reframing did not occur for some reason.

------
Jeaye
Umm, "pirate website" that uses a secure.sci-hub.io, but not actually a secure
connection. Really, Let's Encrypt has made this a no-brainer. _Anyone_ making
a site should be expected to be using SSL. _Especially_ those making anything
related to anything "pirate" or "secure."

~~~
StavrosK
Because if there's one thing pirates are known for, it's their commitment to
your security.

~~~
zanny
I just checked, the two most popular public torrent sites have COMODO CA
default-on https.

These sites do want to maintain security, so their users can keep coming back
rather than getting copyright strikes or worse fines and getting scared off.
That doesn't stop them from putting viruses in the ad banners, but that is not
getting their users arrested.

~~~
chris_wot
Except that torrent sites are not necessarily completely used for pirating.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Torrent sites, especially the popular ones mentioned above, are almost
entirely used for pirating. Bittorrent, on the other hand, is not exclusively
used for piracy.

------
dang
We changed the title from "Sci-Hub – Pirate website providing public access to
millions of research papers" to what the site itself says.

I don't think this was an egregious title rewrite, but the word "pirate" was
becoming the subject of discussion, which a title shouldn't be (and that goes
double for extraneous ones).

------
bobby_9x
It's all fun and games, until someone in the open source community wants the
same copyright protections from a commercial entity using GNU code without
releasing the source.

------
lambdaelite
Silicon Valley and YC don't exactly have a stellar reputation for ethical
behavior. Having a "pirate website" at the top of the news page doesn't
exactly change that perception.

I totally get that journals are evil, and charging money for research
generated with public funds is questionable. It's very frustrating as a small
entity needing to view articles, and being asked to cough up $25-50. That
said, there are legitimate alternatives (like emailing the corresponding
author, or professional society memberships, or alumni library access, or
DeepDyve). The linked website is flagrantly violating copyright and that
should be cause for concern; not breaking the law is part of every engineering
(and professional) ethical code.

~~~
mpclark
I too am disappointed to see this here, though the young hotheads are
obviously out in force today and relishing sticking it to the man.

Surely we are better than this.

One of the earliest lessons I was taught, and I taught my kids, is that if
somebody else has something we want and doesn't want to share it, it's not OK
to just take it.

~~~
kasbah
Firstly, copying isn't the same as taking.

More importantly most of the scientists want their research to be read and
studied as widely as possible but have their careers to worry about. The
journal system is being widely criticised but academics are not in the best
position to take action against it.

The dissemination of knowledge, with it's potential for reducing inequality
and increasing social mobility, is much more important than the profitability
of journal publishers and outweighs the risk of hurt feelings due to a sense
of ownership of knowledge (which seems like a fallacy in itself) that anyone
involved could possibly have.

~~~
lambdaelite
So why not email the corresponding author? I have yet to not get (or give) a
manuscript that way. From my own perspective, each time I respond I'm possibly
getting another citation. It's also a great form of networking.

~~~
germanier
What's the practical difference between getting any paper you need from the
authors and getting any paper you need from such a website? Except much more
work for anyone in the former case without any benefit.

~~~
lambdaelite
Practically speaking, none I can think of. But I completely disagree that the
networking aspect has no benefit.

------
noelsusman
I think people haven't totally thought this open access thing through.

First, publishing costs money, even in the digital age. It costs money to comb
through submissions and decide which ones are worth pursuing. It costs money
to hassle scientists into reviewing the submissions. It costs money to convert
every submission into the same format. It costs money to develop and host a
website to disseminate the articles. All of these things cost money.

Now, who is going to pay for it? Traditionally these costs were put onto the
research institutions in the form of library subscription fees. Open access
shifts this burden onto the author, and ideally grants would include that into
the budget.

Even if grants include that in their budget (and many don't yet), there's a
finite amount of money available for research. Shifting the cost of publishing
onto grants will make funding available for actual research even smaller than
it is now. In some fields publishing costs are entirely negligible compared to
the cost of research, but in others it's not.

Also, open access would mean that you have to have funding in order to publish
a paper. As it stands right now you don't actually need funding to do research
in certain fields. A math professor at a university can devote some of his
spare time to a project over several years and publish a paper on it with no
costs at all. This happens all the time, not every paper has funding behind
it.

I'm not necessarily arguing against open access, I just think people haven't
fully explored the downsides of moving away from our current system.

~~~
dalke
They've been plenty explored, discussed, chewed over, and more, including the
scenarios your presented. The costs have been analyzed in dozens of different
ways, with many business models proposed and some executed upon.

(Note that your mathematician gets indirect funding by having access to the
university library. As a non-academic, I can use the local college library but
must pay access fees for some services that are free to staff and students. At
a somewhat further away university library, as a visitor I can read journals
online but am not permitted to make copies.)

Nor is our "current system", concentrated as it is in the hands of Elsevier
(and its 37% profit on revenue), all that old. Most people outside the big
publishing companies didn't fully explore the downsides of moving away from
the system we had before the 1980s - or at the least, nothing like the ongoing
discussions concerning open access.

