Scientific Papers Do Not Have to Be So Expensive
We should be pushing for cheaper academia for all
Nobody likes paywalls.
However, if you’ve been tasked to write a paper in school or have tried searching for more technical explanations when you write for a blog, you would undoubtedly have faced a paywall scarier than those monthly subscription news websites or blogs — the paywall of an academic journal.
Unlike the $0.50 per week subscription to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal or the $5 per month fee to be a Medium member (all 3 of which become even cheaper if you subscribe annually), academic journals are expensive.
When faced with a paywall, you might find yourself staring at a price tag of between $20 to $60 per article (of course, these are longer than your typical news or blog article) if you don’t have a subscription to that particular academic journal. And subscriptions are not cheap either. Many specialized journals (think of each like niche sites not unlike Bloomberg, In-Fisherman Magazine, and Vogue) charge more than $5000 a year.
Furthermore, since researchers have to look for research from different sources (one cannot just cite all the papers from a single academic journal — much like how we should read from different news sources to ensure that we…
