Quartz: “The coronavirus pandemic triggered a torrent of academic papers. By August 2021, at least 210,000 new papers on covid-19 had been published, according to a Royal Society study…Of the 720,000-odd authors of these papers, nearly 270,000 were from the US, the UK, Italy or Spain. Scientists have paid to publish their covid-19 research—sometimes as much as $5,200 per article. Subscriber-only journals maintain their high fees, running into thousands of dollars a year; in 2020, the Dutch publishing house Elsevier, which puts out journals such as Cell and Gene, reported a profit of nearly $1 billion, at a margin higher than that of Apple or Amazon. And Western scientists are pressing to keep data out of GISAID, a genome database that compels users to acknowledge or collaborate with anyone who deposits the data. “We really want to share our data,” Senjuti Saha, a microbiologist working in Dhaka, told Nature, “but it is heart-breaking and demotivating when we know we worked so hard to generate data, but we don’t get the credit for it.”…