Now this is an interesting development! We shall observe what comes of it, though.
Meanwhile, a group of Finnish researchers are organizing a review boycott [1] against Elsevier, one of the reasons being Elsevier's unyielding opposition to the Finnish libraries' OA requests [2].
This probably comes up all the time in these discussions, but any change in this area has to be top down. i.e., People with influence and job security like tenured faculty need to signal a change and move to open access. A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals. I'm not too familiar with the journal culture, but at least in CS with conferences, all the critical work (program committee, reviews etc.) is done for free by everyone involved. That it can end up behind a paywall is quite sad.
Shouldn't this come from the political level (as it does in OP)? I mean we finance this work with taxes, why not just make it a (grant) requirement that all results need to be made publicly available? (And everyone would be uploading shit to the internet so fast it would make all our heads spin...)
But if the high level accademics don't move to access on their own, government certainly has a large role in encouraging and incentivizing them to make the change, especially considering they provide a large amount of funding for academic institutions and research. Government action can certainly help us get there faster and more certainly than were we to wait for people to do it of their own accord.
It's not that simple. Where I live and work the implementation of these policies is actually quite horrible. We're supposed to put everything in open access repositories under a creative commons license and at the same time are supposed to publish in top journals if we want to have any career prospects. But almost no reputable journal of any rank and name allows this dual licensing - not Springer, De Gryuter, Oxford Journals, which alone make up > 90% of all journals in my area, and many journals demand the author to sign a copyright transfer agreement or equally strong publishing contracts.
When we pointed out this conflict to superiors, top science administration officials and university directors and asked about legal support, the idea was that we get no legal support whatsoever! If we breach a publisher's contract because we're forced to by the government, we're on our own. And it doesn't stop there. Assessment of tenure track positions is done by committees that are not staffed with science administration people but with independent peer reviewers, of course, so the procedures cannot really be changed. But if they could be changed somehow, e.g. by forcing these panels to disregard closed access publications, we'd get a whole generation of complete crackpot professors and the level of science would go down the gutter nationwide, because there are simply not enough reputable open access journals. Anybody can upload something in an open access repository, whereas the top journals I'm talking about have acceptance rates below 5%.
So for us currently the choice is between ignoring the open access policies and getting into trouble with the local science administration folks, or giving up our careers and any prospects to ever get a fixed position, and most people chose the former for obvious reasons.
This is happening on all levels: New researchers want to publish Open Access if they don’t hit Nature or Science, because that gets them more citations. Libraries push for Open Access. Permanent employees see that Open Access is how science should be.
A senior academic professor write papers with graduate students and postdocs.
Because the senior professor wants his/her students to be successful in their next job search, he/she will continue to submit papers in high impact not open access journals.
Doing otherwise would penalize heavily his students and postdocs.
Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.
> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications
Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.
Systematically refusing to do reviews really doesn't help your changes of getting your own papers (and those of your grad students) accepted in the future. Editors have a lot of freedom in deciding what's on topic for their journal.
In my field (theoretical CS), I have never heard about a journal refusing papers from authors that have declined to review for the journal. In fact I would consider this extremely shady: journals shouldn't handle papers differently depending on the identity of the authors, no matter the reason.
What motivates the senior scientists to do this? Is it because they want to guide the latest research in high-impact journals, oblivious of any profit motive? In the life sciences, many top researchers are actually editors or on the board of journals in their field.
From my experience, there is no doubt that relationships with editors help a scientist publish in better journals. And sour relationships make it harder -- not impossible, but harder. This system is pure meritocracy only in our minds.
I get voted into oblivion every time I post this when this topic comes up (which is like, every other day), but the fact of the matter is that nobody cares about 'open access' in academia (well, not 'nobody' in the pedantic nerd sense, but 'nobody' as in 'only a vocal but ultimately insignificant minority', mostly very junior researchers - who usually don't even have their PhD's yet; the number of senior faculty staff who spends time on writing blog posts about this is minute). In fields where there are elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations (but, of course, who call themselves 'principled' and 'not corrupted by money' and that sort of spin on it) like CS and physics the proportion is higher, but still not enough to make a real difference.
The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers (as opposed to the 'open access' 'advocates' who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only all research was downloadable without logging in anywhere) has it through their universities, or you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way. The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers. People jump at the chance of sending their papers to that one person in the world (besides their parents) who actually cares enough to ask about it.
So there is no practical incentive for most people to care enough to put effort into changing the status quo, and the current situation is maybe not optimal but well, neither is the quality of the coffee in the staff room, and if given the choice, most researchers would choose a better coffee machine over all journals being open access.
Note that I don't care one way or another; I don't gain in any way from papers not being publicly accessible. If tomorrow everything is open access, or all open access journals stop existing, won't make one bit of difference to my life. But what I do find annoying is the incessant whining about this topic from people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever, but who will take any opportunity to declare how big bad faceless 'them' is the personification of evil and how everybody else should change to make the world fit their worldview better, while those who are actually affected by this have many other things to worry about and don't care as long at doesn't cause extra work (or change for the sake of it).
The majority of academics I have talked to about this in real life (let's say... 30-40 out of 50) thought we sorely needed open access in terms of:
- The public pays for science, they should be able to see the result
- Lots of out-of-work and between-jobs academics, scientists-turned-entrepreneur, scientists in small companies etc. that can't access a research library
- It's morally wrong to have the public sector hand so much money to a few private companies like Elsevier for doing very little besides existing and rent-seeking.
- Scientists and the public in developing countries and third world countries have a very limited ability to get involved in global science and engineering when it's paywalled.
- In fields like medicine especially, paywalls are literally preventing the public from knowing how to be healthy.
Have you considered that maybe the reason why for example, "The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers." is because it's not openly and freely published?
I suspect perhaps the reason you are being downvoted (on other sites presumably) is because most people think your view is wrong or unacceptable i.e. immoral. Have you considered that possibility?
> mostly very junior researchers - who usually don't even have their PhD's yet
Do you have evidence to support this claim? I have heard major open access support coming from very senior and influent members of diverse research communities.
Even assuming that you are right, don't you think that age may be a confounding variable? Of course the opponents to the status quo are not often found among its the most established members. Of course researchers who have always worked with the Internet are more hostile towards editors as they have never known the times where they were providing a useful and nontrivial service.
> elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations
This is ad hominem, and a weird one at that. I don't see how the "value of interpersonal relations" has any relationship with the issue at hand.
> The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers [...] has it [...]
Sci-Hub was serving 200k download requests per day in early 2016 (source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pira...). so it looks like in fact many people need to access scientific articles and are not served well by the current system. (You may say that it doesn't matter as long as Sci-Hub is around, but Sci-Hub cannot get funding easily or be advertised widely, because of the legal insecurity around the precious service that it provides.)
> who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only
The issue isn't about how many papers we would read. Open access advocates usually have access to subscriptions. The problem is about people outside academia.
Yes, many papers are actually not read that much at all, and certainly are not read a lot outside of academia. But it's certainly not true that there is zero interest for academic research outside academia. The most obvious example are the numerous HN submissions and comments about stories related to open access, often coming for people who care about getting access to scientific articles but are not academics.
Further, the problem of closed-access is that it perpetuates the disconnection between academia and the rest of the world. If you have to hunt for scientific papers, it's sure that not many people outside academia will want to read them. The same for developing countries: poor universities can't get access to research, so they can't contribute to research, and are locked out of the system. Open-access is about saying that science is not a private club but is open to anyone.
> you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way
(1.) You have to know that you can do this, most people outside academia do not, and it's not obvious: usually when faced with a paywall on, e.g. an online newspaper, you don't ask the authors. (2.) This only works for authors who have contact information online, are responsive, in particular are alive. (3.) As a researcher I download around a paper a day on average, if I have to find contact info and write and send an email and wait for a reply for each of them, it adds up. (4.) If the authors send you their papers, they may be violating their editor's copyright, so this is still a broken system. You can say it doesn't matter and that I'm a dogmatic purist, but meh, to me it's not OK that a third party can tell me I don't have the right to share my work. It's not OK that distributing my work is an integral part of my job but is a legal minefield because of a problem which shouldn't exist.
> people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever
As a researcher, I have to sign away to editors the rights to the research that I produce, so that the editors can sell it to unsuspecting people in exchange for having put zero effort in doing the research. Meanwhile I have to work around legal obstacles to put my work online under an open license. I'd like to tell people to do what they want with my work (the way I do with my code with open-source licenses), but I can't, because maybe it's not true and publishers would have the right to object. As a taxpayer, I see the government wasting tens of millions in subscriptions to journals so that universities can buy access to the contents of public research, so I am an accomplice of this if I publish in closed-access journals. I have seen many good students get disgusted of academia when it turned out that they had to give away all rights to their work so that some corporation could make money out of it; many of my non-academic friends blame me and other researchers for their participation to this ridiculous system.
There are some valid points in what you write, but I don't understand the hostility. Even if open access mattered as little as what you seem to think, it's still a step in the right direction, so why so much contempt?
The thing (at least for me) is that it feels hypocritical to refuse to review after having benefitted from many other people's reviews when submitting to those same journals.
I have heard this argument and I don't think it's valid. We are stuck in a broken system where researchers are pressured to publish in closed-access venues. It's hard to act against this at the publication level, because you may need to publish in such venues (for career reasons), and (more importantly, at least for me) you often co-author papers with other people who may not share your dislike of closed access.
By contrast, acting at the review level is your own choice, it carries little penalty, and it is just as effective (closed-access journals would not be sustainable if no one reviewed for them). I don't think it's hypocritical to admit that you publish in closed-access journals because of career pressure or coauthor pressure, but you would prefer if such journals didn't exist so you act against them at the review level.
This looks like it violates the golden rule, but in fact it does not: if everything followed this policy, closed-access journals would disappear. :)
Tenure isn't the end of the road and tenured researchers don't work alone.
Tenured professors are often not the primary authors on papers -- their students and post-docs are and they need to get their papers into good (paywalled) venues. Moreover, they still need to convince people to give them money to hire students and postdocs. If you are a big kahuna, maybe you can get away with taking a moral stand and publishing in OA journals, but it's way easier to sell yourself and maintain your status if you publish where everyone else publishes.
I agree with what you say, but I do not understand why it is related to my comment. I was trying to say that refusing to publish in closed-access journals is hard, but refusing to review for them is easy.
I am ambivalent about this. "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs? The costs for OA in Elsevier (for example) could easily go beyond 1000$ [0]. Open Access does not mean access to articles at a higher costs. OA is to access articles for which you already paid for. Here, I see a sort of double payment - tax payer research funds + article access. Why should we pay exorbitant article access fees for research already funded by tax payers?
> "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs?
This is only for what private publishers like Elsevier call "open access". Reputable publishers like LIPIcs (in computer science) charge 60 EUR per article. Besides, they charge this for all articles (i.e., there is no option to publish closed-access), so they do not sell subscriptions, hence there is no double payment.
Oops, right. I thought the parent comment referred to "double dipping" for hybrid journals (those that have both open-access and closed-access articles): where research institutes pay once for "open-access article processing charges" (to publish) and once more for subscriptions (to read the articles that are closed-access).
Of course, all of this is in addition to the intrinsic cost of doing the research.
Makes sense. If my tax money is going to a study, I should see all results and supplementary data.
Right now I'm researching a few studies that have been shown to be... "not 100% forthcoming"... thanks to some court documents, drafts, and collusive emails found in PACER. It has forever changed the way I'll look at any research, government-funded or not.
Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful.
In the past the cost of papers was paid on the demand side and borne communally, now the cost is paid on the supply side. Science still values paper counts and citation counts - but it seems to me that folks who can afford publication now have an unhealthy advantage that they didn't used to!
In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.
There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article:
> you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example).
This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors.
In any case, the huge profit margins of publishers indicate that the cost of this dubious service is much lower than the charge.
But the most important point is this: doing minor copyediting shouldn't be grounds to own the journal and own copyright on the published articles. The journals should be owned by scientists, or by a nonprofit scientific society. Even assuming that research needs to pay for copyediting services, these should be contractors of the nonprofit (with competition among them), not owners of the journal and articles.
In the biomedical fields, many articles have to be deposited on PubMed Central, which requires them to be reformatted in their archival JATS XML format. Since articles are typically written in Word in those fields, this process involves a lot of manual tagging of references and figures and such, only partially aided by scripts. The process must incur a fairly hefty cost in maintaining warehouses full of people to do the tagging.
In principle it's great that articles are uniformly in XML -- you could easily write reader software for tablets or phones, data-mine the text, extract references, whatever -- but I haven't seen much software taking advantage of it.
So... require that the scientists submit the articles in JATS instead of Word files or PDFs? LaTeX already knows about the stuff you mentioned, so it shouldn't be too hard to make it output JATS directly. In fact, that already seems to exist[1].
Typically there is a "script", not the code kind, that is followed for every dodgy Word document received, and following the script is outsourced. The production team is in charge of coordination with the outsourced team and final proofing of the XML and all the vagaries of pre publication that comes from 90s era processes and software and interactions with other ancient systems.
However! Once published and out the door, the shiny XML is available for scraping and transformation, and, if OA, there is no reason the XML can't be made public: https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-article-xml
In geophysics I also see lots of polishing, and that helps the quality a lot (though you have to be vigilant as author and always check the new version lest some fix to an assumed typo changes the meaning of a sentence in a subtle-but-important way).
Yeah, as in forcing you to submit in an artificially crappy template with horrible double spacing (which is awful as a reviewer) to then apply their standard template and voilà! The paper looks good.
give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example)
They do that (with varying quality) but it's quite aggravating that they charge thousands of dollars mostly for that, while peer review, which is much harder, is done for free.
You must be joking. There is a lot in the line for an academic journal and its website. First one need an submission and review system, after a paper accepted there is proofreading and art department, and editors also need to decide whether to invite someone write a commentary on which paper, and subsequent comment and response section if a paper raise questions/interest, then billing department and production for the physical magazines who also handle the preprints(EDIT: should be "reprints"). Finally the website platform which keeps all those digital versions of current and previous publications. I am just talking about this from an end user point of view, and I believe there are other things behind curtain we are not familiar such as deciding the future directions of a journal, writing press release, etc. Also journals do promote themselves, which inevitable incur costs.
As already pointed out, the costs of peer review and distribution are tiny in comparison to what is actually charged. The $1000 cost thing looks like an improvement but isn't, really. It asks authors to pay so that the publisher can claim to support open access but without impacting their fatcat bottom line.
Elsevier et al are nothing but leeches on the back of the academic community. They provide zero benefit and need go to the fuck away.
I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.
I dare you when you use your real name to criticize a recent paper of top guru in field is total garbage and never has a moment worrying about subsequent funding application which the guru usually serves the reviewing board.
A professor of mine (of philosophy of economics and scientific methodology) was effectively banned from several major journals in his field for roughly ten years because he made an argument about labourers' stock ownership in a Marxist economist conference—and one of the audience members was an influential chairman in those journals.
People seem to think that there is no politics in academia and science, and that everybody is automaton-rational people with no ulterior motives. Very, very wrong...
Most Open Access journals have special exemptions for poor scientists, institutions, and countries. On Elsevier and Hindawi and IEEE, if you are from a low income country, Open Access publishing is free.
The UK is already (getting) there. UK Universities are assessed by the "Research Excellence Framework" (REF). In order for work output (i.e. papers) to be considered by REF, final peer reviewed papers must be deposited into an open access repository within 3 months of acceptance.
Awesome. I do think all publicly funded research papers should be available. Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be.
Maybe if America had open access, things would of turned out a lot better for Aaron Swartz :(
When I did my master's, I explicitly chose 2-clause BSD as the license for all the code I had produced as part of the thesis. My thesis project was done with, and paid for, by the university I attended. Since my work was being funded with public money, I felt it only fair to release everything with a liberal license.
The review board expressly noted two things that were out of the norm with my thesis. One: I chose to include source code with my thesis. Every copy came with a CD-ROM. (I even made sure to upload the same archive to the digital library so access to print copies was not required.)
And two: the review board made a point of mentioning that I released the sources for my thesis project with a very liberal license. What I had considered only fair, the board considered out of the ordinary.
Footnote - I didn't include just the sources. I included the entire .svn/ hierarchy to provide complete editing history.
Footnote 2 - I picked up git in 2007. Thesis was done in 2006.
Really well done. A decade later it's still a struggle to get some basic things negotiated and signed off when code is part of a submission, like an open license, a specific revision to be pinned to the paper if under version control, or simply getting the code into version control if not.
This requires training up and down the line and it's helpful if authors push for these basic things because if a formal process isn't in place to handle exotic content like code, then it may get dropped from the final submission because it's simply too much of an effort for everybody.
I think that the history should be mandatory also for the comments (i.e. from your adviser or reviewer). That could apply for other scientific disciplines as well and give a very good indication on the quality of the process that the thesis went trough, sadly academics are the worst people to agree on anything.
>Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be.
Well, "private" and "public" is a fuzzy distinction.
Most of the mega-private companies get so much public money (in the form of subsidies) or avoid paying so much money (in the form of special tax deals and exception laws they lobby and pay under the table for) that end up costing more to a state than lots of its own operations.
When they tanked after decades of gluttony and playing it fast and loose with huge profits (which they didn't share of course), the "private" financial firms got a 1 trillion government bailout (and similar treatment in Europe and elsewhere), whereas no small private business will ever see a dime in such fashion.
It's also fuzzy because money doesn't just come from one place. I know grad students who were paid off NSF grants but worked on projects also funded by private companies.
The increase in GDP should make it profitable for government to fund all journals. The cost is relatively small as compared to the benefit to all citizens, allowing them to understand new technologies, business and social structures. Like education, this seems like a way to spend public funds with a high return on investment. Obviously this isn't the only reason governments should spend money--veterans and health care for retirees shouldn't be ignored--but it's nice when spending grows the economy.
> The cost is relatively small as compared to the benefit to all citizens
The cost is in fact small just compared to the subscription fees. I don't have the statistics for how much countries pay editors in subscription fees (because in fact these deals are often negociated in private and the terms are secret), but I think it is highly likely that this money is several times higher than what it would cost to run everything on private money.
Sounds like a good goal, though it also sounds ripe for abuse. Will "fake scientific papers" be a new version of fake news? A surge of industry or agenda funded junk or cherry picked science?
What you're saying is meaningless. This concerns knowledge that's already public. Open access simply means that laypeople and institutions would be able to access something for free that others are currently paying for. It's not secret in as much that books sold for profit aren't secret.
It is not clear from article, there no word published, " All scientific papers should be freely available by 2020" and "The means are still somewhat vague but the determination to reach the goal of having all scientific articles freely accessible by 2020 is welcome,"
I can decrypt it a little bit :it would be great if European leaders cared about access to articles, but there are other possibilities for example this burocratique organization need some more finances or of we consider that magazines should be recompensed so financial group controlling some publisher is lobbing it in order to make more money, in your opinion does it make sense?
Nothing I guess.
I think I missed the point. The other one might be that providing free online access to already published scientific papers, all of them from the beginning of the time, it's kind of ambitious project.
I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by the publishers.
Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article. If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the universities or governments to undertake. They should not be allowed to release Nature's formatted/published version. This is how Pubmed Central works currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals' version). When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.
It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely available. But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years. You can't just "undo" that. And they're still doing it today. If scientists truly felt strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).
>most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).
This is sort of the gist of the problem. For one, the researches themselves are shielded from the lack of open access because all major universities have institutional access. Secondly, no one wants to take up the auxiliary work that would be required to publish a journal, even if it's only publishing on the web. And finally, it's hard to replace history and prestige of existing journals. Younger researchers will continue submitting to these journals since they care more about their careers than ideals. Any change in public perception would have to be driven top down by people already established in their fields.
I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. --- It's rightly owned by the publishers.
Are you American? I ask because this comment reflects a particularly American notion of property as an immutable, "God-given" right. In this thinking, governments exist to protect private property, not define it.
As someone else pointed out, the concept of intellectual property only exists in law that is inherently mutable. And whether the government can take away someone's property by redefining it as not property -- that's a question over which Americans once fought a bloody civil war.
> I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication.
Of course they have the authority. Publishers own these works on the basis of copyright law. Laws can be changed by governments.
> Publishers own these works on the basis of copyright law.
That is actually one interesting discrepancy, I think there are some countries where you can not assign away the copyright to your work for someone else in a manner that you loose the copyright yourself. Anyone familiar with this or am I just remembering things incorrectly?
In such case how would Elsevier and the like react when someone decides to put their work published in such paper on their blog for free?
> I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free.
Nobody is telling publishers what they have to do.
The directives are aimed at publically funded institutions, instructing them how public research funds can be used.
This is about the customer's money, and I imagine also in any capitalist philosophy the government as a customer has the right to decide how its own funds can be used.
> When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.
Don't you think that this is of very little added value? Nature could publish the submitted articles as is, and nobody would care. The only value the journal has is the supposed prestige of getting an article published there, which has ridiculous early career effects.
Maybe it wasn't voluntary 25 years ago, but there are plenty of options today and most scientists still send most papers to for-profit publishers. You can argue about the culture and career pressures that influence those decisions, but the fact remains that there are alternatives that are still not commonly used. Other fields have managed to get around this (eg ArXivX in Physics) so it's on biologist/chemists to figure this out, too.
The journal choice is still not fully voluntary. Each field has certain flagship journals, and you are going to publish in them because they have large impact on the prospects for future career. The journals are flagships for historical reasons --- it takes time for a journal accumulate credibility and attract high-quality papers. If the flagships in your field happen to be owned by Elsevier, the you are going to be squeezed. Granted, the existence of arXiv and others alleviates the open access issue, but not the issue of crazy profit margins of the publishers.
The fact that it's tax payer funded is extremely relevant. It's not 100% their research. I pay for research whetherI want it or not - it should at least come with the string attached that I don't have to pay to read the results.
You should not forget that governments are above money and law. They could essentially change IP property laws. It is about academic freedom which EU citizens deserve to have. You raised some good points about the publishing of new articles, however currently the peer review is already done by public organizations. And I believe that presentation is not that difficult. In the end I think it will boil down to publishers retrieving subsidies.
I don't think many are talking about undoing copyright protection for past papers (it's not impossible, but harder to achieve and likely fraught with legal issues), so I think you are arguing against a strawman there.
For the future, submitting to OA(-friendly)-publications can be demanded or be part of the conditions for public funding.
Illegal or not, it resolves the issue for the majority of the demographic that needs regular access to publications but for some reason does not have this granted to them through their institution. I'm not sure how large this group is, and I've never needed to use SciHub, but I can't say I'm not wholly unsympathetic to their cause from an ethical standpoint.
Meanwhile, a group of Finnish researchers are organizing a review boycott [1] against Elsevier, one of the reasons being Elsevier's unyielding opposition to the Finnish libraries' OA requests [2].
[1] http://www.nodealnoreview.org/
[2] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Scholarly+publications+-...