NORTH: Limiting knowledge is a detriment to society - starherald.com: Opinion

" ... But what if the knowledge you wish to learn is locked away behind a wall so expensive that you can no longer learn? This is a dilemma I face. I’m not alone. Academic research has become commercialized and publishing giants like Elsevier want every dollar it can get. There are academics who are doing vital research in many fields that can’t access data they need for their research. Universities around the world complain about the high price of access to academic journals. While I am a layman who loves continuing to learn and one could argue I don’t need access, there are real consequences to people who are trying to make the world a better place, but cannot afford to do so. Publishers claim they charge a high fee for access because it costs $5,000-50,000 to publish a journal. Paul Peters, president of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association and chief strategy officer at the open-access publisher Hindawi in Cairo, told Nature his group published 22,000 articles at a cost of $290 per article. Brian Hole, founder and director of the researcher-led Ubiquity Press in London, says that average costs are $300. PeerJ’s costs are in the 'low hundreds of dollars' per article ... Kazakhstani neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan started Sci-Hub to counteract these paywalls. Sci-Hub hosts more than 47 million articles from places like JSTOR, Springer, Sage and Elsevier, according to Digital Trends. Hundreds of thousands are downloaded each day. Sci-Hub is being sued by Elsevier. Good luck finding her. No one knows where she is and many scientists have come to her defense ..."