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。根据题文同序原则，可定位至最后一段。该段第一句指出，在某些方面，科学类刊物出版业类似于社交网络经济：为了获取社会地位而免费提供劳动力，结果只是让少数几家控制市场的大公司获利。通俗来讲，就是多数人养活了少数人，因此D项正确。

错项排除：文中多次提及subscription，但未提到Trial subscription（试用订阅）的相关内容，故A项排除。定位句指出，免费提供劳动力是为了换取地位，B项与此不符，故排除。第六段最后讲到，成本的增长率超过了通货膨胀率，C项表述与此相悖，故排除。

长难句分析：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.

本句为复合句。主句为冒号之前的部分，主句的主语为the scientific publishing model，谓语为resembles，宾语为the economy of the social internet。句子开头的In some ways作主句的状语。冒号后面的部分是对主句的解释说明，共包含两个分句，由while连接，表示对比关系。

句意为：从某些方面来说，科学类刊物的出版模式类似于社交网络经济：免费提供劳动力是希望换取社会地位，但巨额利润却被少数几家操纵市场的大公司赚取。