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Publish or Perish

When I was in graduate school, in the days when the Internet was just becoming a thing and the world wide web did not exist, I really needed to read a paper. It was the famous Stephen Hawking paper where he rips off Jakob Bekenstein's idea and shows that black holes radiate particles.
Trouble is it was published in a for profit journal called Classical and Quantum Gravity, by Elsevier, and subscription cost was $30,000/year.
My institution didn't take it, and for that reason I never got to read that paper. What I knew about it, I had to divine from references in other, cheaper, journals.
Journal publishing has always been a scam. First, you pay page charges -- that is, you pay the costs of publication. Then you pay a subscription to see what you have published. Finally, you pay yet another fee to provide reprints to people who ask or to provide open access (which really is "library who subscribes access").
Journal publishing is stupidly profitable. Elsevier is the worst of the lot. They are the spawn of Satan.
In physics, publishing in journals is largely a thing of the past, only done to satisfy the tenure and promotion committee. If you rely on papers published in journals, you are at least a year behind everyone else.
Instead, we have an online tool called arXiv where everyone, but everyone, publishes preprint versions of their work. Peer review is sacrificed for the sake of cheapness and speed. The only filter is that if you are not an academic, you need to be endorsed by one.
There is also a Russian site called Sci-Hub. It is pure piracy. It is the Pirate Bay for science, and hosts over 50 million copyrighted articles. It is immensely popular. it is massively illegal.
There has been desultory push back against this for a while. The American Physical Society publishes some open access journals that are online only, no paper, and free to anyone who wants to see them.
The idea of open access has spawned yet another area of graft -- pay for play journals. There are a large number of "peer review journals" that will publish literal gibberish, available to anyone to read, if you pay them. Online, of course. The AAAS ran a sting a few years ago where they combined random paragraphs from a paper on hematology and another on geology and submitted it for publication. The blood of rocks made the cut at a number of "open access" journals.
Had I been a less ethical person, I would now still be working at Spelman. I would simply have purchased a paper in one of these journals and gone on my merry way. The administration of the college literally does not care, as long as you have a citation to show to parents. Blood from rocks would be just fine.
So this is a Big Deal. The University of California system has told Elsevier to take a hike.
"UC wanted to pay a single, reduced lump sum for open access publishing and subscriptions in Elsevier’s journals. Elsevier wasn’t willing to meet its price. So UC dropped its Elsevier subscriptions, which had cost $10 million a year."
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The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
The UC system just dropped its $10 million-a-year subscription to the world’s largest publisher of academic journals.

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