7 ms·

Don Knuth letter about libraries increasingly unable to afford prices (2003) [pdf]

190 points by kbradero 3y ago

prirun 3y ago
Relevant: https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/could-kkrs-ownership-of-overdrive-raise-questions-about-simon-schuster-purchase https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/could-kkrs-ownership-of...
kensai 3y ago
I am only popping in to say: "wow! what a fantastic typesetting!" (but I shouldn't be surprised)
- vargr616 3y ago
  it's actually quite basic, when it comes to what (La)TeX can do
kbradero 3y ago
this letter is from 2003.
amerine 3y ago
I'm curious if anyone subscribes to journals they would recommend today?
- kingkongjaffa 3y ago
  Besides arxiv which is free, the last time I looked at papers properly was when I was a graduate student. so, of course I had free access to virtually everything. It’s not really cost effective to subscribe to an individual journal and the topics across an entire journal are not as focused as you might think. there’s a lot of irrelevant stuff published compared to your specific research (the purpose of these papers is to publish very specific articles and you read them to help you with your own very specific research.) Alls to say it’s an odd question because an individual wouldn’t really subscribe to a specific journal, like you would with a magazine or periodical.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  Well, there's _TUGboat_, the journal of the TeX User's Group --- free with a membership (or membership is free w/ a subscription), but it's rather specialized, and a non-profit thing.
b800h 3y ago
It's interesting to note that in the context of this letter about the Journal of Algorithms, that there is now an open-access journal called "Algorithms" which looks like it launched five years after this letter: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms https://www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms
- _delirium 3y ago
  With a different set of problems imo. MDPI is a for-profit publisher with a "pay-to-publish" model, charging authors $1800 per accepted paper. And also a mixed reputation on quality, verging on a "paper mill" where they accept anything just to maximize their publication fees. Not a great model imo. There are non-profit Platinum OA journals that don't charge publication fees, like JMLR (https://www.jmlr.org/ https://www.jmlr.org/), which is the only kind of OA I consider interesting.
- tokai 3y ago
  Take a look at the length of the "controversies" part of that publisher's wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers...
TOMDM 3y ago
> P. S. Im sending copies of this letter to several friends who are interested in journal publishing but are not members of our board. But this is not an "open letter"; I would prefer not to have my remarks circulated widely. I'm emphatically not a revolutionary. I just want our journal to do the right thing. :/ EDIT: as others have pointed out the letter is now hosted publicly by Knuth himself.
- TylerE 3y ago
  (2003) (@dang too)
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  This was his thinking in 2003. Nowadays he is publishing this in his own website at Stanford (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth)
  - taejavu 3y ago
    I think GP is pointing out Knuth did not want this letter to become public knowledge, yet here we all are reading it.
    - jolmg 3y ago
      We're reading it from Knuth's website, where he shared it.
      - taejavu 3y ago
        Ah yep I misread the post I’m replying to, my bad.
devsda 3y ago
Not a rhetorical question. Are they more affordable now in 2024 ? How much does the existence of open access journals affect the affordability overall ?
- nirse 3y ago
  It's hard to compare as the business model has changed, I believe that nowadays it's basically impossible for a library to get an individual subscription to a individual journal: subscriptions are bundled and (online) subscriptions are sold institution wide with contracts running in the millions. That's very different from what Kunth is describing, where individual libraries choosing what subscriptions they need (eg we need the JoA in our (physical) collection so we buy a subscription to that).
- RheingoldRiver 3y ago
  No, the price of ebooks is insane and getting worse. Libraries are somewhat of a captive market for publishers and they set insane costs & limit the number of times an ebook can be checked out before the library has to buy it again. IMO the cost of electronic materials to libraries is one of the biggest issues in our society that no one talks or knows about.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    I never understood the overpricing of ebooks... A price of a book is a price of the "data" inside (copyright) + price of paper, printing, binding, packing material and distribution A price of an ebook is a price od the "data" inside (copyright) and the price of cheaper digital distributon. So, you save on paper, boxes, trucks, you often also save on retailers (if you sell directly), and you want more money for that? No paper for me, and you also take resale options away.. and for more money? Just the resaleability is a scam... if you bought it, you own it. If buying isn't owning (including reselling, reading on any device, etc.), then piracy isn't stealing. I'm sure government regulation could solve both problems, but they're more interested in screwing the "normal people" instead.
    - 3y ago
DrinkWater 3y ago
Can someone return this mans videos? https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news03.html#videos https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news03.html#videos
- p0w3n3d 3y ago
  It's taking too long. At least 20 years now
jf 3y ago
"I love my library and the other libraries that I visit frequently, and my blood boils when I see a library being overcharged." Given the topic and my love for Knuth, I went into this paper ready to agree with him. But Knuth does a great job at stating his case. This sentence caught my eye: "Elsevier, however, ignored my letter and did not reply" - who in their right mind would ignore a letter from Knuth?!
- riedel 3y ago
  They don't talk to anyone unless many libraries stop paying [0]. I wonder however if those open access deals will mean the death blow to printed copies and classical libraries. [0] https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier
- IanCal 3y ago
  Because people keep throwing huge amounts of money and content to Elsevier while asking them to stop making money. This isn't a defense of Elsevier by the way. The scholarly system is abysmal for publications and it's seemingly incapable of any meaningful change over non-geological timeframes. But if you keep paying people to do something then they're going to keep doing it. If they stop, someone else will appear if that's the kind of thing you're funding. What's insane to me is the biggest complaints come from three main groups - scientists, libraries/the universities that fund them, and funders. The content producers keep giving Elsevier content, the libraries keep buying it and the funders keep paying the content producers to give their content to Elsevier. Universities keep demanding academics give their content and their time for free to these journals else they don't get the progression they want. Elsevier is a nasty symptom but a symptom non-the-less of this dysfunction. Those groups can absolutely change how things are done but the field moves glacially.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Because people keep throwing huge amounts of money and content to Elsevier while asking them to stop making money. Because the broken rest of the system (i.e. financials tied to "how many papers did you get published") incentivizes everyone to keep the status quo. The entire academia publishing clusterfuck needs massive government intervention to dismantle.
vasco 3y ago
Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. Perhaps it's the quality of my writing but my personal experience is that even being way more concise, most people wouldn't care.
- nirse 3y ago
  I guess you should take into account that you are not (one of) the most preeminent computer scientists in the world, right?
  - debatem1 3y ago
    Do you listen longer when your best dairy cow moos?
    - nwiswell 3y ago
      If my best dairy cow was Don Knuth, my bones would be NP-Hard.
      - bigbillheck 3y ago
        Please don't post kink fantasies on the hacker news forums.
    - irrational 3y ago
      I don’t know. Don’t cows moo constantly?
  - thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    If Don Knuth sent me a 14-page letter, you bet I'm gonna read it. I might frame it.
    - anonzzzies 3y ago
      I would definitely frame it. I framed an email from Norvig and a note from Dijkstra. Get joy from small things.
sam_lowry_ 3y ago
He is attending the wrong library. Library Genesis is the way, now. And Library Sci-Hub. And I am only half-kidding.
- freefaler 3y ago
  And annas-archive
- d_tr 3y ago
  The libraries where I live are seriously a joke anyway, and even if they were not, I doubt they could compete with a website where you can find monographs addressed to like 100 people, in seconds, in your pyjamas.
- Kratacoa 3y ago
  All that stuff lands on LG/AA thanks to those who have subscriptions, i.e. libraries
- juls333 3y ago
  That's honestly quite tragic as we don't evolve anywhere fast enough to not be hit by global depression as the digital solitude clashes with the innate human needs of real socialization.
  - irrational 3y ago
    You aren’t supposed to socialize at brick and mortar libraries.
    - itishappy 3y ago
      That's not really true. > Twenty-five percent who went to the library learned about political or cultural organizations or leisure activities taking place in the local community. More than 20% went to the library with friends or colleagues to work together on a common assignment or a leisure activity. Seventeen percent used the Internet at the library to contact friends via e-mail, to chat, or to participate in discussion groups, etc. Sixteen percent used the library to learn more about local matters, social or political issues, etc., that they are involved in. Fourteen percent participated in organized meetings, such as author's nights, lectures, meetings with politicians, etc. Ten percent used the library as a place to meet family or friends before going together to the movies, into the city, to do shopping, etc. (p.19) https://www.ala.org/tools/research/librariesmatter/use-public-libraries-community-involvement https://www.ala.org/tools/research/librariesmatter/use-publi...
javierbg95 3y ago
[dead]
oli5679 3y ago
Aaron Swartz articulated the problems with gatekeeping of knowledge. Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy https://github.com/pablorgarcia/open-access-manifesto/blob/gh-pages/text/manifesto-en.txt https://github.com/pablorgarcia/open-access-manifesto/blob/g...
1oooqooq 3y ago
say the person with the most expensive book for sale.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  There is a common irony of authors selling overpriced books complaining about things being too expensive. And I wish it applied to Knuth. Unfortunately, Knuth books are not the most expensive, by far. Sure, TAOCP is about $300, which is expensive, but it is not a single book, and it totals to about 3000 pages, which is 10 cents per page. It is actually below average for textbooks. In his letter, he complains about articles selling at 50 cents per page, so 5 times more than his "most expensive" books. So for me, it is true that Knuth is "part of the system", and also that buying TAOCP is probably a waste of your money (because there is >90% chance you will never read it...), but here, he has a point. So much that today, many don't even bother paying for articles at all, if it is not open access and it is not on sci-hub, it gets ignored.
gorkempacaci 3y ago
I love the veiled threat in Page 4 about Journal of Logic Programming all editors abandoning Elsevier and starting a new journal (Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)), noting the TPLP thrived after this and Elsevier's own restart having gone off the map. Especially with the balancing note at the end saying the cost per page of this new journal wasn't much cheaper.
soegaard 3y ago
The story goes that one of Niels Bohr's friends visited him and found him deeply engrossed in writing an application to a fund. Surprised, the friend asked why it took so long for such a prominent scientist as Bohr to write a simple application. Bohr replied, "I'm trying to make it short, but I haven't had time yet."
- jwilk 3y ago
  https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
  - philomath_mn 3y ago
    This is good research but terrible writing. Why are the instances so out of order? I understand starting with the first English occurrence, but why not go from there to the oldest known occurrence in any language?
rauhallinen 3y ago
Some rants from the foxhole. American Chemical Society is the one of the main publishers in molecular sciences. Researchers at Finnish universities haven't been able to access articles published after 2023 after failed negotiations [0], greatly hindering one's - and collectively the nation's - ability to progress in these fields. It's quite frustrating, shocking, and eye-opening to have this rug pulled beneath you. Finland is not a poor country, and the situation is surely worse elsewhere. Nonetheless, our economy and the academic funding situation is quite crappy and getting crappier. In 2022, Finnish university library consortium spent ~25M€ for subscriptions [3]. Last year, the negotiated sum for seven main publishers was ~16M€, inc the failed ACS deal. One can easily imagine better ways to use the dozens of millions. Science is expensive and inequalities between countries/uni's/wherever are a n unfortunate fact of the world. Not every player can pay millions to get the 10M€ Cryo-EM machine, and thus can't compete in advancing knowledge frontier in this. To some extent, constraints cultivate creativity. One can still participate through collaboration, theoretical and computational work, creative crafting of experiments with already existing equipment (& with fascinating DIY low-cost open-science hardwarex stuff!) However, one must know the giants on whose shoulders one stands on, and the game played by the behemoth publishers attacks this fundament. The consequence - inequality in accessing knowledge is deeply disgusting in its artificiality. Meanwhile, people at eg. MIT are able to get the whole ACS corpus in sweet delicious machine readable XML [3]. In the same time it takes for the "poor" researcher to get one email requested watermarked pdf with detached figures that they excitedly share to their group, a Boston grad student can curl terabytes and science-of-science/NLP/RAG the shit out of it. Gap exists and grows with the arbitrarily increasing costs. Something needs to change, but for now, I'm cynical. Strong will get stronger and so on. Thank god for open science movement living on github and *rxivs, and for the risky work taken on by shadow librarians. [0] https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/ https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/ [1] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset [2] https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-avoimuudesta-neuvotellaan-jalleen/ https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-... [3] https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data-mining-at-mit/ https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data...
- Vivtek 3y ago
martinclayton 3y ago
And the outcome was ... ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)[1][2] [1] https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms
- svat 3y ago
  Yup: > In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editorial_boards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
  - SeanLuke 3y ago
    This sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't. A similar thing happened with Machine Learning (Springer) and for the same reason: the entire editorial board abandoned it and founded the Journal of Machine Learning Research (https://jmlr.org/ https://jmlr.org/). But Machine Learning recovered and is still a dominant factor -- and still charging high fees.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

190 points by kbradero 3y ago

Relevant: https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/could-kkrs-ownership-of-overdrive-raise-questions-about-simon-schuster-purchase https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/could-kkrs-ownership-of...

kensai 3y ago

I am only popping in to say: "wow! what a fantastic typesetting!" (but I shouldn't be surprised)

vargr616 3y ago
it's actually quite basic, when it comes to what (La)TeX can do

kbradero 3y ago

this letter is from 2003.

amerine 3y ago

I'm curious if anyone subscribes to journals they would recommend today?

kingkongjaffa 3y ago
Besides arxiv which is free, the last time I looked at papers properly was when I was a graduate student. so, of course I had free access to virtually everything. It’s not really cost effective to subscribe to an individual journal and the topics across an entire journal are not as focused as you might think. there’s a lot of irrelevant stuff published compared to your specific research (the purpose of these papers is to publish very specific articles and you read them to help you with your own very specific research.) Alls to say it’s an odd question because an individual wouldn’t really subscribe to a specific journal, like you would with a magazine or periodical.
WillAdams 3y ago
Well, there's _TUGboat_, the journal of the TeX User's Group --- free with a membership (or membership is free w/ a subscription), but it's rather specialized, and a non-profit thing.

b800h 3y ago

It's interesting to note that in the context of this letter about the Journal of Algorithms, that there is now an open-access journal called "Algorithms" which looks like it launched five years after this letter: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms https://www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms

_delirium 3y ago
With a different set of problems imo. MDPI is a for-profit publisher with a "pay-to-publish" model, charging authors $1800 per accepted paper. And also a mixed reputation on quality, verging on a "paper mill" where they accept anything just to maximize their publication fees. Not a great model imo. There are non-profit Platinum OA journals that don't charge publication fees, like JMLR (https://www.jmlr.org/ https://www.jmlr.org/), which is the only kind of OA I consider interesting.
tokai 3y ago
Take a look at the length of the "controversies" part of that publisher's wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers...

TOMDM 3y ago

> P. S. Im sending copies of this letter to several friends who are interested in journal publishing but are not members of our board. But this is not an "open letter"; I would prefer not to have my remarks circulated widely. I'm emphatically not a revolutionary. I just want our journal to do the right thing. :/ EDIT: as others have pointed out the letter is now hosted publicly by Knuth himself.

TylerE 3y ago
(2003) (@dang too)
nextaccountic 3y ago
This was his thinking in 2003. Nowadays he is publishing this in his own website at Stanford (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth)
- taejavu 3y ago
  I think GP is pointing out Knuth did not want this letter to become public knowledge, yet here we all are reading it.
  - jolmg 3y ago
    We're reading it from Knuth's website, where he shared it.
    - taejavu 3y ago
      Ah yep I misread the post I’m replying to, my bad.

devsda 3y ago

Not a rhetorical question. Are they more affordable now in 2024 ? How much does the existence of open access journals affect the affordability overall ?

nirse 3y ago
It's hard to compare as the business model has changed, I believe that nowadays it's basically impossible for a library to get an individual subscription to a individual journal: subscriptions are bundled and (online) subscriptions are sold institution wide with contracts running in the millions. That's very different from what Kunth is describing, where individual libraries choosing what subscriptions they need (eg we need the JoA in our (physical) collection so we buy a subscription to that).
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
No, the price of ebooks is insane and getting worse. Libraries are somewhat of a captive market for publishers and they set insane costs & limit the number of times an ebook can be checked out before the library has to buy it again. IMO the cost of electronic materials to libraries is one of the biggest issues in our society that no one talks or knows about.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  I never understood the overpricing of ebooks... A price of a book is a price of the "data" inside (copyright) + price of paper, printing, binding, packing material and distribution A price of an ebook is a price od the "data" inside (copyright) and the price of cheaper digital distributon. So, you save on paper, boxes, trucks, you often also save on retailers (if you sell directly), and you want more money for that? No paper for me, and you also take resale options away.. and for more money? Just the resaleability is a scam... if you bought it, you own it. If buying isn't owning (including reselling, reading on any device, etc.), then piracy isn't stealing. I'm sure government regulation could solve both problems, but they're more interested in screwing the "normal people" instead.
  - 3y ago

DrinkWater 3y ago

Can someone return this mans videos? https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news03.html#videos https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news03.html#videos

p0w3n3d 3y ago
It's taking too long. At least 20 years now

jf 3y ago

"I love my library and the other libraries that I visit frequently, and my blood boils when I see a library being overcharged." Given the topic and my love for Knuth, I went into this paper ready to agree with him. But Knuth does a great job at stating his case. This sentence caught my eye: "Elsevier, however, ignored my letter and did not reply" - who in their right mind would ignore a letter from Knuth?!

riedel 3y ago
They don't talk to anyone unless many libraries stop paying [0]. I wonder however if those open access deals will mean the death blow to printed copies and classical libraries. [0] https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier
IanCal 3y ago
Because people keep throwing huge amounts of money and content to Elsevier while asking them to stop making money. This isn't a defense of Elsevier by the way. The scholarly system is abysmal for publications and it's seemingly incapable of any meaningful change over non-geological timeframes. But if you keep paying people to do something then they're going to keep doing it. If they stop, someone else will appear if that's the kind of thing you're funding. What's insane to me is the biggest complaints come from three main groups - scientists, libraries/the universities that fund them, and funders. The content producers keep giving Elsevier content, the libraries keep buying it and the funders keep paying the content producers to give their content to Elsevier. Universities keep demanding academics give their content and their time for free to these journals else they don't get the progression they want. Elsevier is a nasty symptom but a symptom non-the-less of this dysfunction. Those groups can absolutely change how things are done but the field moves glacially.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Because people keep throwing huge amounts of money and content to Elsevier while asking them to stop making money. Because the broken rest of the system (i.e. financials tied to "how many papers did you get published") incentivizes everyone to keep the status quo. The entire academia publishing clusterfuck needs massive government intervention to dismantle.

vasco 3y ago

Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. Perhaps it's the quality of my writing but my personal experience is that even being way more concise, most people wouldn't care.

nirse 3y ago
I guess you should take into account that you are not (one of) the most preeminent computer scientists in the world, right?
- debatem1 3y ago
  Do you listen longer when your best dairy cow moos?
  - nwiswell 3y ago
    If my best dairy cow was Don Knuth, my bones would be NP-Hard.
    - bigbillheck 3y ago
      Please don't post kink fantasies on the hacker news forums.
  - irrational 3y ago
    I don’t know. Don’t cows moo constantly?
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  If Don Knuth sent me a 14-page letter, you bet I'm gonna read it. I might frame it.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    I would definitely frame it. I framed an email from Norvig and a note from Dijkstra. Get joy from small things.

sam_lowry_ 3y ago

He is attending the wrong library. Library Genesis is the way, now. And Library Sci-Hub. And I am only half-kidding.

freefaler 3y ago
And annas-archive
d_tr 3y ago
The libraries where I live are seriously a joke anyway, and even if they were not, I doubt they could compete with a website where you can find monographs addressed to like 100 people, in seconds, in your pyjamas.
Kratacoa 3y ago
All that stuff lands on LG/AA thanks to those who have subscriptions, i.e. libraries
juls333 3y ago
That's honestly quite tragic as we don't evolve anywhere fast enough to not be hit by global depression as the digital solitude clashes with the innate human needs of real socialization.
- irrational 3y ago
  You aren’t supposed to socialize at brick and mortar libraries.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    That's not really true. > Twenty-five percent who went to the library learned about political or cultural organizations or leisure activities taking place in the local community. More than 20% went to the library with friends or colleagues to work together on a common assignment or a leisure activity. Seventeen percent used the Internet at the library to contact friends via e-mail, to chat, or to participate in discussion groups, etc. Sixteen percent used the library to learn more about local matters, social or political issues, etc., that they are involved in. Fourteen percent participated in organized meetings, such as author's nights, lectures, meetings with politicians, etc. Ten percent used the library as a place to meet family or friends before going together to the movies, into the city, to do shopping, etc. (p.19) https://www.ala.org/tools/research/librariesmatter/use-public-libraries-community-involvement https://www.ala.org/tools/research/librariesmatter/use-publi...

javierbg95 3y ago

[dead]

oli5679 3y ago

Aaron Swartz articulated the problems with gatekeeping of knowledge. Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy https://github.com/pablorgarcia/open-access-manifesto/blob/gh-pages/text/manifesto-en.txt https://github.com/pablorgarcia/open-access-manifesto/blob/g...

1oooqooq 3y ago

say the person with the most expensive book for sale.

GuB-42 3y ago
There is a common irony of authors selling overpriced books complaining about things being too expensive. And I wish it applied to Knuth. Unfortunately, Knuth books are not the most expensive, by far. Sure, TAOCP is about $300, which is expensive, but it is not a single book, and it totals to about 3000 pages, which is 10 cents per page. It is actually below average for textbooks. In his letter, he complains about articles selling at 50 cents per page, so 5 times more than his "most expensive" books. So for me, it is true that Knuth is "part of the system", and also that buying TAOCP is probably a waste of your money (because there is >90% chance you will never read it...), but here, he has a point. So much that today, many don't even bother paying for articles at all, if it is not open access and it is not on sci-hub, it gets ignored.

gorkempacaci 3y ago

I love the veiled threat in Page 4 about Journal of Logic Programming all editors abandoning Elsevier and starting a new journal (Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)), noting the TPLP thrived after this and Elsevier's own restart having gone off the map. Especially with the balancing note at the end saying the cost per page of this new journal wasn't much cheaper.

soegaard 3y ago

The story goes that one of Niels Bohr's friends visited him and found him deeply engrossed in writing an application to a fund. Surprised, the friend asked why it took so long for such a prominent scientist as Bohr to write a simple application. Bohr replied, "I'm trying to make it short, but I haven't had time yet."

jwilk 3y ago
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
- philomath_mn 3y ago
  This is good research but terrible writing. Why are the instances so out of order? I understand starting with the first English occurrence, but why not go from there to the oldest known occurrence in any language?

rauhallinen 3y ago

Some rants from the foxhole. American Chemical Society is the one of the main publishers in molecular sciences. Researchers at Finnish universities haven't been able to access articles published after 2023 after failed negotiations [0], greatly hindering one's - and collectively the nation's - ability to progress in these fields. It's quite frustrating, shocking, and eye-opening to have this rug pulled beneath you. Finland is not a poor country, and the situation is surely worse elsewhere. Nonetheless, our economy and the academic funding situation is quite crappy and getting crappier. In 2022, Finnish university library consortium spent ~25M€ for subscriptions [3]. Last year, the negotiated sum for seven main publishers was ~16M€, inc the failed ACS deal. One can easily imagine better ways to use the dozens of millions. Science is expensive and inequalities between countries/uni's/wherever are a n unfortunate fact of the world. Not every player can pay millions to get the 10M€ Cryo-EM machine, and thus can't compete in advancing knowledge frontier in this. To some extent, constraints cultivate creativity. One can still participate through collaboration, theoretical and computational work, creative crafting of experiments with already existing equipment (& with fascinating DIY low-cost open-science hardwarex stuff!) However, one must know the giants on whose shoulders one stands on, and the game played by the behemoth publishers attacks this fundament. The consequence - inequality in accessing knowledge is deeply disgusting in its artificiality. Meanwhile, people at eg. MIT are able to get the whole ACS corpus in sweet delicious machine readable XML [3]. In the same time it takes for the "poor" researcher to get one email requested watermarked pdf with detached figures that they excitedly share to their group, a Boston grad student can curl terabytes and science-of-science/NLP/RAG the shit out of it. Gap exists and grows with the arbitrarily increasing costs. Something needs to change, but for now, I'm cynical. Strong will get stronger and so on. Thank god for open science movement living on github and *rxivs, and for the risky work taken on by shadow librarians. [0] https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/ https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/ [1] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset [2] https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-avoimuudesta-neuvotellaan-jalleen/ https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-... [3] https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data-mining-at-mit/ https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data...

Vivtek 3y ago

martinclayton 3y ago

And the outcome was ... ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)[1][2] [1] https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms

svat 3y ago
Yup: > In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editorial_boards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
- SeanLuke 3y ago
  This sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't. A similar thing happened with Machine Learning (Springer) and for the same reason: the entire editorial board abandoned it and founded the Journal of Machine Learning Research (https://jmlr.org/ https://jmlr.org/). But Machine Learning recovered and is still a dominant factor -- and still charging high fees.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]