[HN Gopher] In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)
Author : peignoir
Score : 299 points
Date : 2022-12-07 06:23 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (custodians.online)
(TXT) w3m dump (custodians.online)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)_ -
| 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 - Feb 2016 (25
| comments)
| frollo wrote:
| To be honest, I expected a bigger discussion on this topic.
| codetrotter wrote:
| 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 - Dec 2019
| (257 comments)
|
| _Indian academics throw weight behind Sci-Hub and LibGen in
| landmark case_ -
| 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 - Sept 2021
| (161 comments)
|
| _Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science (sci-
| hub.io)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11093779 -
| Feb 2016 (217 comments)
| faloppad wrote:
| Is there any at to support this?
| euroderf wrote:
| AFAIK Russia has left sci-hub alone. Good for them!
| culi wrote:
| Good for everyone. From academics to students to Wikipedia
| contributors and even all those who are supposedly harmed by
| it but actually indirectly benefit
| cammikebrown wrote:
| If you have available storage space, keep a backup of
| information that you find to be useful or important.
| chrisbaker98 wrote:
| Does that support libgenesis or scihub? Sounds like it only
| supports yourself in case they get taken down.
| greenpresident wrote:
| The backups are distributed via torrents, so it's a bit of
| both.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| 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.
| nathias wrote:
| 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 ...
| n4jm4 wrote:
| Publicly funded research should generally be available at no cost
| and bother to the public.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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=1738790492983466495...
| published only in Arxiv, and it got 9 citations.
| Udo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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".
| diego_moita wrote:
| 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.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| 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.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| 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 (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 (>1000
| comments over six submissions)
|
| [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy
|
| [1]:
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz...
|
| EDIT: formatting
| comfypotato wrote:
| For those who enjoyed this thorough summation of the state of
| the art, you may find the following forum interesting:
| https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/1597/is-it-im...
|
| It's a well organized discussion of the philosophical
| viewpoints surrounding piracy. I felt a compulsion to share
| based on the parent's use of "where none _should_ exist" (which
| borders on opinion).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| vj636 wrote:
| Yes, that's one possible solution to the issue of out-of-
| print works. Compulsory licensing or royalty payments for
| these works could provide a way for them to be republished
| and made available to the public again. This would create
| value by ensuring that these works remain accessible, and by
| providing a financial incentive for publishers to republish
| them.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| i will try to explain my stand. 2005-12. a small "user" from
| india HAD 0 means to purchase online content. local content
| in the stores was the same expensive "imported" stuff and TV
| was the only main means of consuming content. then with
| internet, i could suddenly go to piratebay and watch any
| movie or read any book or download any game. talking about
| "buying using paypal and stuff", INDIANS STILL CANNOT EASILY
| BUY FROM INTERNATIONAL SELLERS, you need a "credit card, then
| you need to call your bank to allow international transaction
| and then it fails most of the time". this problem exists in
| 2022, forget about 10 years ago.
|
| to put that into perspective, https://nextbigwhat.com/indias-
| credit-card-industry-key-stat...
|
| says "A thread While at 925mn debit cards are highly
| penetrated, credit cards is still a nascent industry ~ 50mn
| card base (3.5% per capita, unique cards ~60% of this" so
| only 2.1 mil card holders in india who can potentially buy
| from foreign markets online.
|
| that said, if i consume content here in india, "HOW AM I
| CAUSING SALES LOSS TO POOR RIAA and americaan authors and all
| the content creators?". this is same for 15 years ago and
| today. a lot of stuff doesnt exist in india in the official
| market so yeah.
|
| this goes for MOST OF THE WORLD, pricing has helped because
| for a long time, amazon prime is being sold in india for inr
| 1500/year or US $17. while in the US the same costs
| $14.99/month (plus tax). same for netflix and stuff. they
| made india specific pricing and people are adopting them but
| it is basically impossible for me at least to pay
| $14.99/month (plus tax) if amazon prime did not exist in
| india and i had to pay for american prime.
|
| this is the same problem with scientific journals for
| example. $35 is normally put as a price but that amount is A
| LOT in indian rupees and the same for rest of the world who
| are not on american living standard and cannot pay american
| prices.
|
| i get it, the moral argument of "you dont pay, you dont get
| access to our content for which i own the copyright for" but
| also "doesnt matter if you own the rights or not, i was never
| going to pay or even if i was, i couldnt pay legally so it
| doesnt matter because i havent cost you anything
| financially".
|
| there is a case against DRM, if you pay, you get more
| restrictions than if you dont so whats the point?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is broadly correct of course. Modern IPR's have been
| _explicitly_ pushed since the 1990s or so as a neo-
| colonialist racket; force dirt-poor people in other parts
| of the world to pay for the West 's tech and content, and
| rake in the billions. Needless to say it doesn't work like
| that and can never work like that.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| yes, and as i said, the pricing is always made with
| american rates in mind, sure $100 looks good for a
| software/ music cd or a movie, whatever but poor people
| from poor countries cannot afford it in the first place.
| ebooks are especially stupid in this regard. we are told
| "this book costs $20 to write, edit, print, sell,
| transport, wastage and all that" but when it comes to
| ebooks, prices are equal or more so what happened? i was
| told back when that a textbook author gets no more than
| 5% of the sticker price royalty. rest is in
| transportation and seller margins and stuff. i've always
| said "here, 5% of $20 is $1. how about the author gets $2
| or 3, that is the extent of my "moral obligation" and
| everyone is happy but no. "
| eccentricwind wrote:
| It's basically "You didn't lose money because I pirated
| your product, I had no money to begin with".
|
| I can relate to this, coming from a poor background. I
| would've never be where I stand today If I didn't have
| access to the published material on the internet for free.
|
| Also, the prices of scientific papers are atrocious! And
| that's not even considering the fact that the researchers
| who wrote the paper and peer reviewed it for free won't
| receive a penny!
|
| What do you expect from me when even Harvard says It's
| expensive?
| themoonisachees wrote:
| See also: game piracy. People who install cracked games
| are mostly kids, or people who can't afford the game.
| GabeN was right, piracy is a service problem. Any
| additional piracy after you solved the service problem
| was never going to be sales anyway, and now you're just
| spending money to prevent people from playing your game.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| yes. game piracy is huge and STEAM is even bigger. for
| once, people ACTIVELY use steam because of the multi-
| player community which is absent in pirated content. sure
| you can pirate a game and play offline but do you want
| to? so even pirates pay for that which makes gabeN the
| one person who ACTUALLY understands the whole thing...
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| Of course, some percentage of pirates become sales
| conversions, as well. I've bought plenty of movies and
| music after pirating it. I know many people like this.
| True that this is the exception, not the rule, but then
| we're back to the "I am only consuming this because it's
| free" issue.
| samarthr1 wrote:
| A nit, the argument with be easier to read without the all
| caps in certain places. That's just personal preference
| though...
| remram wrote:
| That's interesting. You could make Copyright closer to the
| way Patents already work: you get protection for your work,
| but only for as long as you're making it available to the
| public; once you stop licensing your protected work, you lose
| the protection.
|
| So if you publish a work and later stop making that work
| available, it would automatically lose protection and it
| would become legal to share online or for another company to
| print.
| sampo wrote:
| > piracy does considerable harm to large institutes
|
| What do you mean by the word "institutes" here? First thing
| that comes to mind is academic and research institutes, but
| surely piracy doesn't harm them. So you must mean something
| else?
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Elsevier basically. They are always everyones bogieman.
| Predatory publishing houses.
|
| But yeah academics love piracy;)
| roter wrote:
| 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...
|
| Edit: Confirmed as URL [1] finally worked.
|
| [1]
| https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new...
| stainablesteel wrote:
| 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
| npteljes wrote:
| 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?
| bmitc wrote:
| Amazon has Kindle Unlimited. Also, most libraries allow you to
| checkout Kindle ebooks.
| npteljes wrote:
| 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
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _why not a subscription based library_
|
| Why do we need "subscription based" libraries when we have
| plain, old, free libraries?
| npteljes wrote:
| I have a very limited experience with libraries. The concerns
| I had in mind:
|
| 1. Currently popular books were never available in the
| library. When the new Harry Potter came out, there was no way
| I could have got my hands on it.
|
| 2. In my place of residence, Hungary, there doesn't seem to
| be a way to borrow ebooks. Kindle Unlimited is also
| unavailable.
| [deleted]
| xigoi wrote:
| We do. It's called a library.
| npteljes wrote:
| With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading device.
| My country's libraries doesn't really offer ebooks to borrow,
| my device doesn't support Amazon DRM, and Amazon Unlimited in
| not available in my region.
|
| So no, we don't have such a thing.
| aliqot wrote:
| > With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading
| device.
|
| We have this in my little town in USA for over 10yrs now.
| Movies and music and newspapers too. Only thing that this
| process doesn't have is microfiche.
| npteljes wrote:
| I hope this comes to Hungary sometime!
| m4rtink wrote:
| Frankly "borrowing an ebook" just does not make sense to
| me.
|
| After many millennia of humanity striving to preserve
| knowledge we now have a way to make unlimited perfect
| copies of books but instead of really making use of it we
| instead put an unnecessary complicated system in place that
| makes the book artificially unavailable after some time.
|
| Its like how early cars in Britain had to be preceded by a
| guy with a flag, really- trying to force and limit a new
| invention into the existing outdated system.
|
| Or worse it even reminds me of book burning, removing
| perfectly fine book copies that could make it more likely
| for the book to survive in the future, like has happened
| for personal copies of many famous ancient text with the
| original texts being long lost.
|
| I'm sure every ancient librarian would love to be able to
| provide books for every human alive - yet we now have the
| means of doing that, but choose to artificially sabotage
| it!
| npteljes wrote:
| Well yeah, at the end of the day, it's just another
| avenue of rent extraction. I do think that it would be a
| step up from the current system, where I just can't get
| ebook, end of story.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Libby + your library card offers a pretty similar experience,
| ad free.
| gjvc wrote:
| To give them representation, if not right-of-reply, in this
| forum:
|
| https://www.elsevier.com/open-access
|
| What part of the contents of the above link is unacceptable ?
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Too little too late.
|
| Academics pay through the nose for the right to publish open!
|
| Stick it on the arxive.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > 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.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| 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-informatio...
| (turn off js to view)
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 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?
| naasking wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Bill Gates convinced them not to free up the IP. No joke.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| Aren't mRNA vaccines quite straightforward to manufacture?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| They are incredibly hard to manufacture. They are just
| all manufacture the same way with the same equipment, so
| if you can do one, you can do any.
| api wrote:
| Reminds me of very small integrated circuit process nodes
| where the manufacturing process itself is so rife with
| trade secrets and "art not science" that it's hard to
| duplicate even without IP restrictions.
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| I don't think anything happened at a governmental level,
| but I know some companies open sourced select patents to
| help with the pandemic. I vaguely remember an issue with 3D
| printing ventilator parts because it violated the patent
| [1], but I don't think that company ever actually sued
| anyone, they just threatened it.
|
| 1. https://www.techtimes.com/amp/articles/248121/20200317/m
| aker...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with
| the "publishing industry".
|
| That's quite an understatement.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Remarkably, it once was.
|
| Cheap duplication of written data, conveying knowledge from
| one brain to another without requiring tedious manual
| transcription or oral explanation to each learner, started
| with the printing press in the 1400s and broke the monopoly
| of the literate elite on education, bringing book learning
| and literacy out of scarcity to the masses.
|
| Even into the mid-20th century, academic publishing was
| primarily on paper and relied on expensive offset printing
| that only makes economic sense when printing runs of many
| thousands of copies, requiring a publishing industry to
| produce these documents.
|
| Now, though, that "digital publishing" is available, this
| problem of scarcity no longer exists. The publishing industry
| requires scarcity to make their contribution valuable, and
| they can only create that scarcity artificially.
| kekebo wrote:
| Alternative archive.ph link for people having trouble to
| disable Javascript (e.g. on mobile):
|
| https://archive.ph/EHird
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Poetic.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I did train through times when access to articles wasn't easy
| (because there was no scihub and I worked in india) and
| honestly getting the articles was not even my 10th biggest
| concern. I always had 50-100 pdfs ready to read, adding more
| to that queue was not an issue. Only times when access to
| literature was a problem was when you had a particular
| article you needed details from (which weren't in the
| abstract). This was rarely a blocker and if it was there were
| options.
|
| Again, I'm not saying I wouldn't prefer to have free
| unfettered access to all research ever performed, or that we
| should give these publishers a pass, but I want to emphasize
| that this is not a big issue for academics. Funding, focus,
| politics, the culture of publish or perish, the Ponzi scheme
| like training funnel, these are the bigger issues.
| pksebben wrote:
| bigger issues, perhaps, but it's not either-or, and the
| issues are connected.
|
| the monopoly on publishing centralizes control over
| information, which allows publishers to set the terms
| (publish or perish, publishing focus)
|
| the political and funding landscape are then shaped by an
| entity that now has a structurally adversarial relationship
| to the academics that form it's value base, as it's
| interests are only served by keeping that community
| subordinate.
| djexjms wrote:
| If you want an educated and informed populace (the kind you
| need for democracy to be worth a damn), then access to
| information for as many people as possible is a necessary but
| not sufficient condition. I don't buy that people are dumber
| today than they were a century ago. People did some pretty dumb
| things then as well. If you think things are bad now,
| presumably you would like the situation to improve. I don't see
| how the situation improves if most people would need to take
| out a loan to read academic papers.
|
| Something that is worth noting, is that what these kinds of
| sites are doing is fundamentally the same as what local
| libraries do. Local libraries get a pass only because there was
| a precedent for their existence before copyright and IP law got
| out of hand. Would you have as blase an attitude if this were
| the big five trying to shutdown all the public libraries?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-07 23:02 UTC)