mother f*ckin A. this is exactly what Aaron Swartz killed himself over. yet MIT stood by and did nothing during his torment by the FBI:
The memo from Harvard's faculty advisory council said major publishers had created an "untenable situation" at the university by making scholarly interaction "fiscally unsustainable" and "academically restrictive", while drawing profits of 35% or more. Prices for online access to articles from two major publishers have increased 145% over the past six years, with some journals costing as much as $40,000, the memo said.
More than 10,000 academics have already joined a boycott of Elsevier, the huge Dutch publisher, in protest at its journal pricing and access policies. Many university libraries pay more than half of their journal budgets to the publishers Elsevier, Springer and Wiley.
Robert Darnton, director of Harvard Library told the Guardian: "I hope that other universities will take similar action. We all face the same paradox. We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.
"The system is absurd, and it is inflicting terrible damage on libraries. One year's subscription to The Journal of Comparative Neurology costs the same as 300 monographs. We simply cannot go on paying the increase in subscription prices. In the long run, the answer will be open-access journal publishing, but we need concerted effort to reach that goal."http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-pricesif you haven't watched this video, you need to. such a sad story:
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58note the 14 yo kid at the end of the video who discovered a cure for pancreatic cancer due to the release of the medical literature by Aaron.
Yes, that is all intolerable and asinine beyond belief. How dare Swartz even consider creating a p2p replacement for FriendFace? Death was too good for him!
Along with housing, education and health care costs have been spiraling out of control for decades, ever since the gov't got involved in hiding/externalizing/subsidizing/distorting pricing mechanisms those markets.
Look at at the textbook industry to see a closely interrelated scam.
Fuck Elsevier and the corrupt system that enables/protects it. The law says when you abuse your copyright you lose it.
Pirate ALL the things! Interestingly enough, the first and only known Bytecoin (BCN) application was a deepweb service which retrieved scholastic articles....