7 ms·

In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

322 points by peignoir 4y ago

nathias 4y ago
When doing my PhD library genesis and archive.org made all the difference in the world, I think it would take decades doing it via libraries ...
faloppad 4y ago
Is there any at to support this?
- cammikebrown 4y ago
  If you have available storage space, keep a backup of information that you find to be useful or important.
  - chrisbaker98 4y ago
    Does that support libgenesis or scihub? Sounds like it only supports yourself in case they get taken down.
    - greenpresident 4y ago
      The backups are distributed via torrents, so it's a bit of both.
- euroderf 4y ago
  AFAIK Russia has left sci-hub alone. Good for them!
  - culi 4y ago
    Good for everyone. From academics to students to Wikipedia contributors and even all those who are supposedly harmed by it but actually indirectly benefit
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago
  see my comment above, TL;DR if you have 32TB spare and an internet connection, you can have your own Library of Alexandria in your living room.
dang 4y ago
Related: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369378 - Oct 2022 (1 comment) In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009809 - Feb 2016 (25 comments)
- frollo 4y ago
  To be honest, I expected a bigger discussion on this topic.
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    There are some discussions about libgen and sci-hub with a lot more comments, where you also find broad support of libgen and sci-hub in the comments, such as for example: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222 - Dec 2019 (257 comments) Indian academics throw weight behind Sci-Hub and LibGen in landmark case - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366621 - Nov 2021 (89 comments) Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421477 - Sept 2021 (161 comments) Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science (sci-hub.io) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11093779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11093779 - Feb 2016 (217 comments)
RupertEisenhart 4y ago
This google search[0] will provide a list of interesting papers about piracy. They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here: - piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the legitimate sales of ongoing comics, whereas increased the legitimate sales of completed comics. The latter result is interpreted as follows: piracy reminds consumers of past comics and stimulates sales in that market." [1] - piracy does considerable harm to large institutes (but largely seen as a good thing) - for sales, a lot of the lost revenue seems to be made up for "increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices" - that DRM creates fake scarcity where none should exist-- distribution costs are now zero, we shouldn't pretend that we still need to pay so much for books and music - how to make sure artists still have a revenue stream needed to exist is definitely still a problem, but it is not one that is solved by crushing pirate libraries Also further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 (517 comments, recent) And, to the person down below who wants to help out, check out the further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org (>1000 comments over six submissions) [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy [1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p... [2]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholzergee.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz... EDIT: formatting
- zozbot234 4y ago
  This seems to imply that you could get most of the socially-desirable effects of piracy simply by instituting compulsory royalties for previously-published works that have since fallen out of print. As of today, most out of print works will simply never get republished and users who want to access them legally have to resort to substandard solutions such as the used market, or merely borrowing a legitimate copy of the work. (Until the work falls out of copyright protection altogether, and then it's fair game for free reproduction by anyone.) Fix this in a comprehensive way and you would create a lot of value. Note that this was essentially Google Books' proposal, before they got forced into only showing tiny snippets of works to avoid copyright issues; it's not a new idea at all.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Each time this subject comes up I feel moved to repost this article [1]. The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry". Brutal, radical reform is now necessary. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio... (turn off js to view)
- kekebo 4y ago
  Alternative archive.ph link for people having trouble to disable Javascript (e.g. on mobile): https://archive.ph/EHird https://archive.ph/EHird
  - i_am_proteus 4y ago
    Poetic.
    - kekebo 4y ago
      Or just pragmatic?
- einpoklum 4y ago
  > Then came the Covid pandemic and “climate emergency”. What had been a friendly, ideological tussle about the digital rights of scientists versus profiteers took on a new tone. To call it “civil disobedience” would be to miss the point. Universities simply stopped playing the game – and the more progressive governments followed suit by deeming the enforcement of academic publishers’ copyright no longer in the public interest. So, this didn't happen - and IIANM, there wasn't even a copyright/patent moratorium on vaccine-related IP, right? I seem to recall tussles over where poorer countries would be able to just manufacture copies of the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra-Zeneca vaccine locally, without permission from the IP holders. What ended up happening with that?
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Companies like Moderna did dispense with IP restrictions around the vaccine, but it turns out that this was never a binding constraint in the first place. These vaccines must essentially be brewed via a biological process, not merely synthesized in a chemical lab like most pharmaceuticals. There's probably a whole lot of fuzzy know-how in this that's inherently hard to replicate, no matter what the legal environment is like.
npteljes 4y ago
I wonder why there isn't a "spotify for books"? We got streaming sites for videos, movies and music, why not a subscription based library?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bmitc 4y ago
  Amazon has Kindle Unlimited. Also, most libraries allow you to checkout Kindle ebooks.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    In Hungary, libraries don't seem to have this option. Unfortunately Kindle Unlimited is also limited to regions I'm not residing in[0]. https://www.amazon.com/b?node=18473854011 https://www.amazon.com/b?node=18473854011
  - jonathanstrange 4y ago
    Kindle Unlimited is not a good model, though. It is extremely anti-competitive. I'm amazed that it is legal in the EU (no big surprise about the US). You can only enter it as an author if you guarantee that your book is not available anywhere else. If you don't put your book on Kindle Unlimited, however, then Amazon will make discovery way harder and sales will be very low. It's essentially a way to keep books on Amazon only. On a side note, I once had a book that steadily sold 3-5 copies per month, then ran an ad on Amazon that barely boosted the sales and had negative ROI, and directly afterwards there were 0 sales/month. How do I know Amazon's algorithm hasn't downgraded discovery to make me continue to buy ads? I don't, this is entirely up to Amazon and nobody controls or oversees these kind of things.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >why not a subscription based library Why do we need "subscription based" libraries when we have plain, old, free libraries?
ramraj07 4y ago
Back when I was doing my undergrad in India, I was doing an internship in a lab there. It wasn’t a national lab, so calling that lab dirt poor is an understatement (they used to wash and reuse microfuge tubes). They would typically work with a budget that’s 1/100th of a regular American lab. Naturally their research was also for the most part mediocre or worse. Except one paper that got published in a British journal in the early 00s. I had the privilege of working with the first author of that paper and asked him how he used to get the papers to read back in the nineties when internet wasn’t a thing in India. Be warned that this university’s library didn’t even have Nature or Science. His answer was, if there’s a paper they’d want to read, if it’s at least in a fairly prominent journal, they’d money order 15 rupees to the Indian institute of immunology in New Delhi with an ILL request and hope they respond. If they’re lucky they’d get a copy of the article in a few months. They still did great research for what they were able to afford or read. Great research has always been done when access to articles wasn’t a given. It would be weird to assume that free unfettered access has anything to do with the spread of or lack thereof good scientific knowledge and research. This is not even conjecture. We’ve already witnessed the never-before-in-humanity transformation of all general knowledge to the free public domain in Wikipedia and google, and yet, humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything. In spite of all the roadblocks put by greedy publishers, access to literature has never been this easier in all of history even if you are broke. This even if you exclude scihub as an option (not that I am saying you should, I love that scihub exists and hope it continues to). All I’m saying is, keep fighting this fight but don’t assume it’s anywhere near as important for any real problem in this society, general or academia.
- andrepd 4y ago
  What an odd thing to say. You're saying that you don't think having to wait months to read a paper through backchannels has negatively affected the research output of that lab? > This is not even conjecture. [...] humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything. "Kids these days" effect. People have been complaining about generational decline for at least 2500 years. What are you basing your assertion on, gut feeling? Social media? Clickbaity news? You probably also overestimate the educational level of humanity 100 years ago.
Udo 4y ago
The academic publishing industry in general, and Elsevier specifically, are a curse upon academia and human progress in general. But they only have power if we give it to them. There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos. Of course, an intermediate horror scenario will then come true if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll. However, that could finally push us over the edge to rethink intellectual property timeframes.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos. This will happen a lot quicker if more people work to improve FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interop, Reusability) of content and information that's outside proprietary silos already. Whether old content that has become legally available due to its age, or content that's been published openly in the first place. That's what it would take for people to ignore the silos outright. > ...if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll. Most large publishers are pretty much IP trolls anyway. The incentives inherent in IPR regulation, combined with large monopoly power, push them towards that model.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  The problem (at least for me) is that science is inherently collaborative and most authors on a paper have no say on where a paper is submitted to. Yes, I can say, "We shouldn't publish this in an Elsevier journal because of all the shady things they've done to increase the costs to libraries while providing little added value" and they'll say "The paper is about X. Everybody who works on X publishes in Elsevier's Journal of X. If we don't publish there nobody who works in the field will know about our work".
gjvc 4y ago
To give them representation, if not right-of-reply, in this forum: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access https://www.elsevier.com/open-access What part of the contents of the above link is unacceptable ?
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago
  Too little too late. Academics pay through the nose for the right to publish open! Stick it on the arxive.
roter 4y ago
Related: Scihub's hearing before the Indian courts apparently has been moved back to Feb 2023 if I read the first comment correctly at the Reddit thread that is keeping track of the case [0]. The High Court website is non-reachable for me so I cannot confirm. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement_scihub_has_been_paused_no_new/?sort=new https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement... Edit: Confirmed as URL [1] finally worked. [1] https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new?sno=1&ctype=CS%28COMM%29&cno=572&cyear=2020 https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new...
- stainablesteel 4y ago
  they've been doing this for more than a year iirc, a lot of people say it's going to be years before its day in court happens only to be delayed again when it finally happens i don't honestly know why she's putting up with cutting out adding new papers for this when it was perfectly accessible before. it makes me sad but i hope something good eventually comes from it
diego_moita 4y ago
Before Napster the music industry also had its gatekeepers: the recording companies: EMI-Odeon, Polygram, RCA, Warner Music, ... Online music piracy destroyed them but then it created other gatekeepers: spotify, iTunes, YoutubeMusic... This is just one anecdote, but I still don't believe we'll ever have absolute freedom of information. One way or the other gatekeepers sneak in.
n4jm4 4y ago
Publicly funded research should generally be available at no cost and bother to the public.
xtracto 4y ago
The current publishing model is obsolete and broken. To start to fix it, publishing of scholarly/research articles and Books must be treated completely differently. Their only intersection is that the development of both of them CANNOT be based on a scarcity model. * For scholarly/research articles, the solution is clearcut: Research institutions pay researchers a monthly wage, to do research and produce papers. It's as easy as writing a PDF and uploading it to Arxiv [1]. As a second step, companies like Elsevier, Springer or Macmillan can function as "webs of trust": Getting subscription money for their service, and providing a curation and indexing service as they do now. Shit, they even could provide Editorial/proof-reading services to Universities for people writing the articles. That way, the information itself will be free, and the core value of Elsevier and the others can still be monetized. * For Books, the "write once get paid forever" model must be stopped. Once the book is written and published, it should be freely shareable. To achieve that, authors should use a model similar to "Kickstarter": Write a TOC, maybe a teaser chapter and look to raise the money he wants to write the full book. (Maybe the book was already written, and chapters are released as their full price is paid). That way the author will benefit in full for the "fair" value of what he wrote, and society will be able to use that knowledge. [1] I did one: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17387904929834664955&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1738790492983466495... published only in Arxiv, and it got 9 citations.
throw10920 4y ago
> stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty There's no contrast here - these things are a result of universities charging more to students and paying less to faculty - you're comparing one exploitative industry to another and finding them similar, not different. Don't paint the universities as the "good guys", because they're not. The article makes some solid points (e.g. that Elsevier adds somewhere between "zero" and "negative" value to the academic process) - there's no reason for this silly language in there.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Lib gen and scihub are major forces of good, making scientific and technical literature accessible to researchers and students all over the world. Only the rich and spoiled complain about them.

322 points by peignoir 4y ago

When doing my PhD library genesis and archive.org made all the difference in the world, I think it would take decades doing it via libraries ...

faloppad 4y ago

Is there any at to support this?

cammikebrown 4y ago
If you have available storage space, keep a backup of information that you find to be useful or important.
- chrisbaker98 4y ago
  Does that support libgenesis or scihub? Sounds like it only supports yourself in case they get taken down.
  - greenpresident 4y ago
    The backups are distributed via torrents, so it's a bit of both.
euroderf 4y ago
AFAIK Russia has left sci-hub alone. Good for them!
- culi 4y ago
  Good for everyone. From academics to students to Wikipedia contributors and even all those who are supposedly harmed by it but actually indirectly benefit
RupertEisenhart 4y ago
see my comment above, TL;DR if you have 32TB spare and an internet connection, you can have your own Library of Alexandria in your living room.

dang 4y ago

Related: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369378 - Oct 2022 (1 comment) In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009809 - Feb 2016 (25 comments)

frollo 4y ago
To be honest, I expected a bigger discussion on this topic.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  There are some discussions about libgen and sci-hub with a lot more comments, where you also find broad support of libgen and sci-hub in the comments, such as for example: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222 - Dec 2019 (257 comments) Indian academics throw weight behind Sci-Hub and LibGen in landmark case - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366621 - Nov 2021 (89 comments) Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421477 - Sept 2021 (161 comments) Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science (sci-hub.io) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11093779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11093779 - Feb 2016 (217 comments)

RupertEisenhart 4y ago

This google search[0] will provide a list of interesting papers about piracy. They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here: - piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the legitimate sales of ongoing comics, whereas increased the legitimate sales of completed comics. The latter result is interpreted as follows: piracy reminds consumers of past comics and stimulates sales in that market." [1] - piracy does considerable harm to large institutes (but largely seen as a good thing) - for sales, a lot of the lost revenue seems to be made up for "increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices" - that DRM creates fake scarcity where none should exist-- distribution costs are now zero, we shouldn't pretend that we still need to pay so much for books and music - how to make sure artists still have a revenue stream needed to exist is definitely still a problem, but it is not one that is solved by crushing pirate libraries Also further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 (517 comments, recent) And, to the person down below who wants to help out, check out the further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org (>1000 comments over six submissions) [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy [1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p... [2]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholzergee.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz... EDIT: formatting

zozbot234 4y ago
This seems to imply that you could get most of the socially-desirable effects of piracy simply by instituting compulsory royalties for previously-published works that have since fallen out of print. As of today, most out of print works will simply never get republished and users who want to access them legally have to resort to substandard solutions such as the used market, or merely borrowing a legitimate copy of the work. (Until the work falls out of copyright protection altogether, and then it's fair game for free reproduction by anyone.) Fix this in a comprehensive way and you would create a lot of value. Note that this was essentially Google Books' proposal, before they got forced into only showing tiny snippets of works to avoid copyright issues; it's not a new idea at all.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Each time this subject comes up I feel moved to repost this article [1]. The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry". Brutal, radical reform is now necessary. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio... (turn off js to view)

kekebo 4y ago
Alternative archive.ph link for people having trouble to disable Javascript (e.g. on mobile): https://archive.ph/EHird https://archive.ph/EHird
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  Poetic.
  - kekebo 4y ago
    Or just pragmatic?
einpoklum 4y ago
> Then came the Covid pandemic and “climate emergency”. What had been a friendly, ideological tussle about the digital rights of scientists versus profiteers took on a new tone. To call it “civil disobedience” would be to miss the point. Universities simply stopped playing the game – and the more progressive governments followed suit by deeming the enforcement of academic publishers’ copyright no longer in the public interest. So, this didn't happen - and IIANM, there wasn't even a copyright/patent moratorium on vaccine-related IP, right? I seem to recall tussles over where poorer countries would be able to just manufacture copies of the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra-Zeneca vaccine locally, without permission from the IP holders. What ended up happening with that?
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Companies like Moderna did dispense with IP restrictions around the vaccine, but it turns out that this was never a binding constraint in the first place. These vaccines must essentially be brewed via a biological process, not merely synthesized in a chemical lab like most pharmaceuticals. There's probably a whole lot of fuzzy know-how in this that's inherently hard to replicate, no matter what the legal environment is like.

npteljes 4y ago

I wonder why there isn't a "spotify for books"? We got streaming sites for videos, movies and music, why not a subscription based library?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bmitc 4y ago
Amazon has Kindle Unlimited. Also, most libraries allow you to checkout Kindle ebooks.
- npteljes 4y ago
  In Hungary, libraries don't seem to have this option. Unfortunately Kindle Unlimited is also limited to regions I'm not residing in[0]. https://www.amazon.com/b?node=18473854011 https://www.amazon.com/b?node=18473854011
- jonathanstrange 4y ago
  Kindle Unlimited is not a good model, though. It is extremely anti-competitive. I'm amazed that it is legal in the EU (no big surprise about the US). You can only enter it as an author if you guarantee that your book is not available anywhere else. If you don't put your book on Kindle Unlimited, however, then Amazon will make discovery way harder and sales will be very low. It's essentially a way to keep books on Amazon only. On a side note, I once had a book that steadily sold 3-5 copies per month, then ran an ad on Amazon that barely boosted the sales and had negative ROI, and directly afterwards there were 0 sales/month. How do I know Amazon's algorithm hasn't downgraded discovery to make me continue to buy ads? I don't, this is entirely up to Amazon and nobody controls or oversees these kind of things.
itsoktocry 4y ago
>why not a subscription based library Why do we need "subscription based" libraries when we have plain, old, free libraries?

ramraj07 4y ago

Back when I was doing my undergrad in India, I was doing an internship in a lab there. It wasn’t a national lab, so calling that lab dirt poor is an understatement (they used to wash and reuse microfuge tubes). They would typically work with a budget that’s 1/100th of a regular American lab. Naturally their research was also for the most part mediocre or worse. Except one paper that got published in a British journal in the early 00s. I had the privilege of working with the first author of that paper and asked him how he used to get the papers to read back in the nineties when internet wasn’t a thing in India. Be warned that this university’s library didn’t even have Nature or Science. His answer was, if there’s a paper they’d want to read, if it’s at least in a fairly prominent journal, they’d money order 15 rupees to the Indian institute of immunology in New Delhi with an ILL request and hope they respond. If they’re lucky they’d get a copy of the article in a few months. They still did great research for what they were able to afford or read. Great research has always been done when access to articles wasn’t a given. It would be weird to assume that free unfettered access has anything to do with the spread of or lack thereof good scientific knowledge and research. This is not even conjecture. We’ve already witnessed the never-before-in-humanity transformation of all general knowledge to the free public domain in Wikipedia and google, and yet, humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything. In spite of all the roadblocks put by greedy publishers, access to literature has never been this easier in all of history even if you are broke. This even if you exclude scihub as an option (not that I am saying you should, I love that scihub exists and hope it continues to). All I’m saying is, keep fighting this fight but don’t assume it’s anywhere near as important for any real problem in this society, general or academia.

andrepd 4y ago
What an odd thing to say. You're saying that you don't think having to wait months to read a paper through backchannels has negatively affected the research output of that lab? > This is not even conjecture. [...] humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything. "Kids these days" effect. People have been complaining about generational decline for at least 2500 years. What are you basing your assertion on, gut feeling? Social media? Clickbaity news? You probably also overestimate the educational level of humanity 100 years ago.

Udo 4y ago

The academic publishing industry in general, and Elsevier specifically, are a curse upon academia and human progress in general. But they only have power if we give it to them. There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos. Of course, an intermediate horror scenario will then come true if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll. However, that could finally push us over the edge to rethink intellectual property timeframes.

zozbot234 4y ago
> There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos. This will happen a lot quicker if more people work to improve FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interop, Reusability) of content and information that's outside proprietary silos already. Whether old content that has become legally available due to its age, or content that's been published openly in the first place. That's what it would take for people to ignore the silos outright. > ...if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll. Most large publishers are pretty much IP trolls anyway. The incentives inherent in IPR regulation, combined with large monopoly power, push them towards that model.
jhbadger 4y ago
The problem (at least for me) is that science is inherently collaborative and most authors on a paper have no say on where a paper is submitted to. Yes, I can say, "We shouldn't publish this in an Elsevier journal because of all the shady things they've done to increase the costs to libraries while providing little added value" and they'll say "The paper is about X. Everybody who works on X publishes in Elsevier's Journal of X. If we don't publish there nobody who works in the field will know about our work".

gjvc 4y ago

To give them representation, if not right-of-reply, in this forum: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access https://www.elsevier.com/open-access What part of the contents of the above link is unacceptable ?

RupertEisenhart 4y ago
Too little too late. Academics pay through the nose for the right to publish open! Stick it on the arxive.

roter 4y ago

Related: Scihub's hearing before the Indian courts apparently has been moved back to Feb 2023 if I read the first comment correctly at the Reddit thread that is keeping track of the case [0]. The High Court website is non-reachable for me so I cannot confirm. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement_scihub_has_been_paused_no_new/?sort=new https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement... Edit: Confirmed as URL [1] finally worked. [1] https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new?sno=1&ctype=CS%28COMM%29&cno=572&cyear=2020 https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new...

stainablesteel 4y ago
they've been doing this for more than a year iirc, a lot of people say it's going to be years before its day in court happens only to be delayed again when it finally happens i don't honestly know why she's putting up with cutting out adding new papers for this when it was perfectly accessible before. it makes me sad but i hope something good eventually comes from it

diego_moita 4y ago

Before Napster the music industry also had its gatekeepers: the recording companies: EMI-Odeon, Polygram, RCA, Warner Music, ... Online music piracy destroyed them but then it created other gatekeepers: spotify, iTunes, YoutubeMusic... This is just one anecdote, but I still don't believe we'll ever have absolute freedom of information. One way or the other gatekeepers sneak in.

n4jm4 4y ago

Publicly funded research should generally be available at no cost and bother to the public.

xtracto 4y ago

The current publishing model is obsolete and broken. To start to fix it, publishing of scholarly/research articles and Books must be treated completely differently. Their only intersection is that the development of both of them CANNOT be based on a scarcity model. * For scholarly/research articles, the solution is clearcut: Research institutions pay researchers a monthly wage, to do research and produce papers. It's as easy as writing a PDF and uploading it to Arxiv [1]. As a second step, companies like Elsevier, Springer or Macmillan can function as "webs of trust": Getting subscription money for their service, and providing a curation and indexing service as they do now. Shit, they even could provide Editorial/proof-reading services to Universities for people writing the articles. That way, the information itself will be free, and the core value of Elsevier and the others can still be monetized. * For Books, the "write once get paid forever" model must be stopped. Once the book is written and published, it should be freely shareable. To achieve that, authors should use a model similar to "Kickstarter": Write a TOC, maybe a teaser chapter and look to raise the money he wants to write the full book. (Maybe the book was already written, and chapters are released as their full price is paid). That way the author will benefit in full for the "fair" value of what he wrote, and society will be able to use that knowledge. [1] I did one: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17387904929834664955&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1738790492983466495... published only in Arxiv, and it got 9 citations.

throw10920 4y ago

> stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty There's no contrast here - these things are a result of universities charging more to students and paying less to faculty - you're comparing one exploitative industry to another and finding them similar, not different. Don't paint the universities as the "good guys", because they're not. The article makes some solid points (e.g. that Elsevier adds somewhere between "zero" and "negative" value to the academic process) - there's no reason for this silly language in there.

bigbacaloa 4y ago

Lib gen and scihub are major forces of good, making scientific and technical literature accessible to researchers and students all over the world. Only the rich and spoiled complain about them.