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R Berger's avatar

Books and periodicals (even newspapers) are no longer easy to get or worth the money..Soooo in

really self-defeating way the prices go up to recover from lost readership and ultimately it's like the $10 cheeseburger.

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Bob1's avatar

The root problem is that someone has to pay for the people who shepherd the article from submission to publication. The old model was to have universities and individual subscribers pay; the new model is to have authors (i.e., grants) and universities pay; no one is happy with either. If we want the appearance of free publications freely available, we could have governments pay the costs, but that would create its own problems, as publishers jump in to publish nonsense to get the subsidies from the government. Or we could have governments take over publishing, as they have so many other formerly private activities. The only thing that's certain is that someone will have to pay.

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