Well, those means are there (most of the time), but if researchers want a career in academia, most of the time there's no other option than submitting their work to "high impact" journals. I don't think sacrificing their already slim career choices is a reasonable sacrifice to ask when speaking of voluntarism.
>I don't think sacrificing their already slim career choices is a reasonable sacrifice to ask when speaking of voluntarism.
Right, but I don't see how breaking copyright law is a solution to fixing the problem either. The journals are just going to jack up the rates to cover their "losses".
I am not very sure they can afford to jack up their rates. News in academia spreads really quickly and most researchers can't really afford to pay subs from their pockets.
I know several researchers who are tragic with anything computer-related. Even they picked up SciHub mere days after it made the news for the first time.
IMO jacking up prices in such a climate can succeed but is very risky.
Well, it doesn't fix the greater problem of research being mostly behind disproportionately priced paywalls, but it does solve researchers' immediate problem of access to research. Yes, it's (mostly) illegal and no, I wouldn't endorse it, but I can't blame them too hard either, especially not by drawing on their "voluntary" paywalling of research.
Long term, hopefully there are other ways, and there are plenty of people (including myself) trying to affect that change. If there was an easy way, I'm positive that we'd have found it already, unfortunately. That's not to say that change is in the air, and it might be for the better.
(Btw, as for journals jacking up their rates: most of those rates are pretty non-standard, and the result of "Big Deal" negotiations with university libraries behind closed doors. However, both the pressure of Sci-Hub and publication of the results of some of those negotiations have led to the representatives of public money now having a much stronger negotiating position, so if anything, I'd only expect rates to go down in the short term.)
