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Paragraph 5 and 6和open access terms可定位至第五段第三句。句中冒号后面的句子是对前面内容的进一步解释说明，对答题尤为重要。该句指出，英国超过一半的科研成果是通过开放获取方式发表的：要么是自发表之日起就可以免费获取，要么是付费一年或更长时间也可以获取，这样的话，出版商就可以在文章正式发表之前获得利润。由此可知，开放获取方式使出版商有赚取利润的空间。选项A中的make money是对文中make a profit的同义替换，因此A项正确。

错项排除：文中只是说半数以上的研究成果是通过开放获取方式发表的，并未表明这一方式使科学研究成果的发表变得更容易，故B项排除。文章最后一段说到，去年的一项报告指出，成本在以高于通货膨胀率的速度稳步上升，C项“成本下降”与此不符，故排除。文中说到大学每年要支付订阅费用，但没有内容表明开放获取方式可以使大学摆脱财政负担，故D项排除。