Definitely citation needed on the “(illegal)”.

FYI, this site is very useful and keeps track of the ever-changing sci hub links: https://sci-hub.now.sh/

>Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.

Firstly, the fees imposed by journals are thousands of dollars, which is far too much for many researchers to pay. It would seemingly largely prevent the publication of independent research within such journals.

This was mentioned in the article:

>In fact, many academics still don’t publish in open access journals. One big reason: Some feel they’re less prestigious and lower quality, and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists.

However, the article seemingly (and contradictorily) earlier implies that Gold OA is a solution to pushing the cost onto the researchers:

>Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish.

However, under Gold OA this is only exacerbated, with large fees being everywhere on the publication-end. The readers don't have to pay, but now the authors do.

Additionally, this may create another pro-industry publication bias, as industry-funded studies may be more likely to have the money to publish in pay-to-publish journals, and this apparently has now been dubbed "e-publication bias" (bottom of https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf, also see http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544).

Lastly, the article mentions predatory publishing, however fails to note that this phenomena is caused by Gold OA in the first place. In fact, it is sometimes specifically called "predatory open-access publishing". The idea behind predatory publishers is that Gold OA incentivizes publication (as they now get paid per-paper), leading them to seek out and accept as many papers as possible regardless of quality.

While open science certainly is in-line with my views, I'm not convinced that Gold OA is a good solution here.

Calling Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and all others : please make science Free, Forever, For Everybody.

There's no bigger creator of human development opportunities than free science (imho).

More than a decade? ago, Bill Gates freed the Feynman lectures, only to lock it in Microsoft's Adobe Flash-competing technology, silverlight.

Now do it properly : make it free as in beer and free as in freedom. Yes Bill, you pay everything, we nothing.

That's blaming the victim. It's not the academics who are prestige-obsessed, it's the universities that assess and rank their staff by publication counts within such journals. Most academics I know just want to keep their job.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/s...

[2]: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/10/17182692/bell-curve-charles-mu...