So why is this surprising. Coorporate publishers have been raising prices at double digit rates for three decades on a good that they neither create or review, and these days they don't even print it or mail it. You can purchase an Elsevier article for $35 or so, what a deal! Now if printable PDFs were available form the iTunes store for 99 cents maybe the rate of "theft" would go down. Of course the right answer to the problem is to use open access. I'm betting there was no recorded theft from PLOS.

Charing more than $5 for a research article seems excessive.

On another topic, why the tasteless parenthetical remark about dweebs? Isn't scholarship what we do in the academy? It's a ridiculous, immature comment for a professional publication.

There's nothing ethically dubious about sharing knowledge. Clearly it's to the benefit of humankind for this sort of material to be made as widely available as possible. And there's no realistic argument that without publishers the research wouldn't take place. These publishers are middlemen with a business model that doesn't work in twenty-first century. Good riddance.

These people are sounding like the RIAA with the numbers they quote. They may be deceptive. For example, if I wish to access papers I must physically go with my computer to the institute that I'm affiliated with. Hypothetically, it might be easier for me to simply locate a paper at one of those sharing sites. I don't do that, but it's easy to imagine many who might. While such downloads might violate the letter of the law, they are indeed papers that the individual is entitled to get access to.

The challenge for the publishers is to ensure that access is easy for the people who do have access. Making inflated claims about things being "stolen" from them will do nothing to advance that cause.
The RIAA already tried that; they failed miserably. There is no cheese at the end of that path.

I'll be the first to agree that the for-profit academic journal publishing business model is broken, but at the same time there is wholesale copyright infringement going on. We recently found out that some of our campus user passwords had been compromised, and people in China and Russia were using them to download massive quantities of Amer Chem Society journal articles - by massive, I mean likely systematically, e,g. every article in every issue sequentially. It was the ACS that caught the activity and contacted us. When we started looking more closely at our proxy server logs, we found illegal accesses also coming from various European countries (contacting the particular account holders whose passwords we had to reset confirmed that they were not legit accesses).

It's highly unlikely that the journals involved suffered a $700,000 loss as the summary quotes. That number assumes that everyone who received an article through the service would have purchased the article. It's more likely the case that the recipients would not have read the article, or would have gotten it through different means (for example, through their local library).

This fallacy can be found in much of the reporting about piracy (movies, music) and over states the value of the services that the content producers provide.

This suffers from the same problem as other forms of digital sharing: it's perfectly legal for me to give a paper copy of an article to a colleague. Why should giving them a pdf be any different?

I suspect the journals will do about as well in their efforts as the RIAA has.

As a lay person I have never figured out why these papers written mainly by people paid for by the tax payer are not freely available? I have spend at least US$500+ getting medical papers when our baby son Casper was in hospital to try and educate myself on his condition and all the different approaches taken in different parts of the world. It is obscene....

Why the Chronicle didn't dig deeper and identify the site perplexed me, so I dug in a bit more and called out for crowd-sourced knowledge, and the file-sharing site has been identified. You can read my criticism of the Chronicle's "echo chamber" post and discover the name of the file-sharing site at:

http://bit.ly/AsOHg

Paul_a and others -

You'll be happy to know that there's a mandate going in effect in 2010 that all NIH-finded research be placed in a open access repository. Myself and others are working hard to get as many people as possible to comply and to promote the accessibility of these repositories.

You should probably hug the next academic librarian you see for their efforts in this regard, as well.