There are literally tens of thousands of people in academia who could build a transparent, open-source, non-profit publishing system of their own.

Why don't they?

You wouldn't download a car

And sometimes open access costs money for the author too.

Thank you for the warning. I almost received free and convenient access to a large catalog of academic articles, and no one wants that.

dont ever use this, it has almost everything

Internet memes come from the original concept of memes as an element of culture passed on from person to person.

From Wikipedia's "internet meme" article.

Don't give them ideas for free.

Very frequently you can email the author of the paper and they will be super happy to send you a copy.

I do it all the time. Something something sci-hub. If you ask, the authors will almost always share a preprint.

That's unfair to both vampires and squids

vampire squid makes them sound cute, they are literally the scum of the earth: They are leeching billions from what is normally a tax funded sector and on the side heavily polarising publishing and access to science in favor of rich countries.

Real estate seems to be a popular place for seemingly unnecessary middlemen.

Really? I’ve reviewed and published a good chunk of papers and never received any financial compensation.

I've never gotten a stipend or heard of someone getting a stipend for publishing or reviewing manuscripts. The only thing I've been offered is access to the journal.

That's not an incentive, they're mocking you with money

As of April 2021, PLOS One charges a publication fee of $1,745 to publish an article.

I mean, seriously, I would like to publish to one of these, but who has the money to do that?

There are many other open-access journals, for example these: https://freejournals.org/. But yes, open-access is the way.

We're not saying pay the authors a bunch, we're saying make the papers free to read. Or at least don't charge authors and readers both, while keeping all the money for yourself.

According to Wikipedia, in 2022 Elsevier's revenue was 2.909 billion pounds and their net income was 2.021 billion pounds.

Not going to bother looking up the rest.