Editorial

Academic publishing has achieved what protection rackets could only dream of: the victim funds the product, donates the labour, and then pays again to read it. We formalise this arrangement as the Profiteering Over Openness Policy (POOP), a framework so structurally sound that questioning it requires a tenured position and several years of repressed anger. Under POOP, the paywall functions not as a barrier but as a meritocratic filter: researchers at underfunded institutions who cannot access the literature cannot produce citations, cannot secure grants, cannot afford APCs, and therefore conveniently exit the system — an elegant equilibrium the publisher did not engineer but has elected to maintain. We further introduce Open Access Simulation: pay $9,500 to make your publicly funded research publicly available. Decline, and we charge your readers $49.99 for a 48-hour PDF rental. No printing. The full analysis, including the data, the methodology, and the part where we run out of euphemisms for POOP, is available behind a paywall.