Scientific publishing has long been a licence to print money. Scientists need joumals in which to publish their research, so they will supply the articles without monetary reward. Other scientists perform the specialised work of peer review also for free, because it is a central element in the acquisition of status and the production of scientific knowledge.
科学出版长期以来一直是印钞的许可证。科学家们需要期刊来发表他们的研究成果，所以他们发布的论文将不会获得偿金。其他科学家也免费进行同行评审和专门的工作，因为这是获得地位和产生科学知识的核心要素。
With the content of papers secured for free, the publisher needs only find a market for its journal. Until this century, university libraries were not very price sensitive. Scientific publishers routinely report profit margins approaching 40% on their operations, at a time when the rest of the publishing industry is in an existential crisis.
由于论文的内容是免费的，出版商只需要为它的期刊找到一个市场。直到本世纪，大学对科研经费并不敏感。科学出版社通常报告其运营利润率接近40%。以此同时，其他出版业正处于生存危机之中。
The Dutch giant Elsevier, which claims to publish 25% of the scientific papers produced in the world, made profits of more than £900m last year, while UK universities alone spent more than £210m in 2016 toenable researchers to access their own publicly funded research; both figures seem to rise unstoppably despite increasingly desperate efforts to change them.
荷兰巨头爱思唯尔号称出版了全球25%的科学论文，去年利润超过9亿英镑，而英国大学仅2016年就花了2.1亿英镑资助研究人员；尽管越来越多的人不顾一切地试图改变这两个数字，这两个数字似乎都在不停地上升。
In Britain the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies. In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British scientific research is now published under open access terms: either freely available from the moment of publication, or paywalled for a year or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on general release.
在英国，以开放获取的方式出版的转变是由资助机构推动的。在某些方面它是非常成功的。现在，英国一半以上的科学研究成果都是以开放获取的方式出版的：要么从出版之日起免费提供，要么支付一年或更长时间的费用，这样出版商就可以在正式发布前获利。
The most drastic, and thoroughly illegal, reaction has been the emergence of Sci-Hub, a kind of global photocopier for scientific papers, set up in 2012, which now claims to offer access to every paywalled article published since 2015. The success of Sci-Hub, which relies on researchers passing on copies they have themselves legally accessed, shows the legal ecosystem has lost legitimacy among its users and must be transformed so that it works for all participants.
最极端的、完全非法的、副作用是Sci—Hub的出现，Sci—Hub是一种全球性的科学论文复印机，成立于2012年，声称可以访问2015年以来发表的每一篇付费论文。Sci—Hub的成功依赖于研究人员将自己合法的副本发给他们，这表明法律生态系统在用户中已经失去了合法性，必须进行改造，以便为所有参与者服务。
Yet the new system has not worked out any cheaper for the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover the costs of preparing an article. These range from around ￡500 to $5,000. A report last year pointed out that the costs both of subscriptions and of these”article preparation costs” had been steadily rising at a rate above inflation. In some ways the scientific publishing model resembles the economy of the social internet: labour is provided free in exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a rebalancing of power.
然而，新的制度并没有解决减少大学的科学研究经费的问题。出版商对读者提供免费内容，他们向作者收取费用，以支付发表文章的费用。价格从500英镑到5000美元不等。去年的一篇报告指出，在通货膨胀率和通货膨胀率都在稳步上升。在某些方面，科学出版模式类似于社会互联网的经济：免费提供劳动，以换取地位的希望，而经营市场的几家大公司却获得了巨额利润。在这两种情况下，我们都需要权力的重新平衡。
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