Scientific publishing has long been a licence to print money. Scientists need journals in which to publish their research, so they will supply the articles without monetary reward. Other scientists perform the specialised work of peer review also for free, because it is a central element in the acquisition of status and the production of scientific knowledge.

    With the content of papers secured for free, the publisher needs only find a market for its journal. Until this century, university libraries were not very price sensitive. Scientific publishers routinely report profit margins approaching 40% on their operations, at a time when the rest of the publishing industry is in an existential crisis.

    The Dutch giant Elsevier, which claims to publish 25% of the scientific papers produced in the world, made profits of more than £900m last year, while UK universities alone spent more than £210m in 2016 to enable researchers to access their own publicly funded research; both figures seem to rise unstoppably despite increasingly desperate efforts to change them.

    The most drastic, and thoroughly illegal, reaction has been the emergence of Sci-Hub, a kind of global photocopier for scientific papers, set up in 2012, which now claims to offer access to every paywalled article published since 2015. The success of Sci-Hub which relies on researchers passing on copies they have themselves legally accessed, shows the legal ecosystem has lost legitimacy among its users and must be transformed so that it works for all participants.

    In Britain the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies. In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British scientific research is now published under open access terms: either freely available from the moment of publication or paywalled for a year or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on general release.

    Yet, the new system has not worked out any cheaper for the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover the costs of preparing an article. These range from around £500 to £5,000. A report last year pointed out that the costs both of subscriptions and of these “article preparation costs” had been steadily rising at a rate above inflation.

    In some ways the scientific publishing model resembles the economy of the social internet: labour is provided free in exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a rebalancing of power.

答案精析：本题为细节题。根据题干中的a licence to print money可定位至原文第一段第一句。文章一开始就提到，科学类刊物出版业一直以来都是“印钞许可证”，之后提到两个原因，分别是科学家们会无偿提供论文，以及另一些科学家们免费提供同行评审工作。由此可知，科学类刊物出版业之所以被认为是“印钞许可证”是因为它获取的出版内容都是免费的，D项中的its content acquisition对应第一段第二句的supply the articles，costs nothing对应原文中的without monetary reward，故D项是对这两点内容的概括。在第二段第一句中也明确提到了科研论文内容可免费获取，因此D项正确。

错项排除：文章第三段中提到了funded和increasingly，但原文说的是研究人员在公共资助下所做的研究，以及大学支付的订阅费用和学术出版业的利润有所增长，A项利用原文这两个词进行细节拼凑，故排除。文章第二段说到，出版商只需要找到市场，并不涉及市场营销的具体内容，故B项排除。C项中同行评审费用降低与文中所说的免费的同行评审不相符，故排除。