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：本题为推断题。根据题干中的Paragraph 2 and 3可定位至原文第二、三段。原文第二段主要是讲科研论文的出版是免费的，出版商只需要找到市场即可；而大学图书馆则对钱并不敏感。第三段主要是说学术类出版商爱思唯尔的年利润高达9亿英镑，而英国大学订阅这些科研资料的费用就达到了2.1亿英镑。结合第二、三段内容可知，学术类出版商从大学获得的出版内容（研究人员的科研成果）是免费的，但是大学的研究人员要想重新读到他们自己的研究成果，则需要支付订阅费用，这也是学术类出版商获取利润的模式。由此可知，出版商获利的主要来源是大学，因此A项正确。

错项排除：B项中的existential crisis出现在原文第二段末尾，但原文指的是其他出版商遇到的危机，而不是说爱思唯尔遇到了危机，B项属于张冠李戴，故排除。第三段说在其他类出版业都面临危机的时候，爱思唯尔的利润仍高达9亿英镑，但这并不等同于爱思唯尔振兴了出版行业，故C项排除。文中提到科研工作者的研究成果是受到publicly funded（公共资金资助），并不是爱思唯尔资助的，故D项排除。