The argument continues that journals that have real costs. My response is that prices currently charged for subscriptions are not used to cover costs but simply to make big profits. An example to illustrate this is that papers published in the 2010s and earlier are paywalled. Why? There is no reason – these papers have been published more than 10 years ago. Haven’t the costs of publishing them been covered already? They could be free, but they are being kept closed access only to extract more profits.

As you might know, Sci-Hub’s Twitter account got suspended a few weeks ago, so I thought these insights from the project’s founder and maintainer herself, Alexandra Elbakyan, might be interesting (although the suspension itself is not mentioned here).