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Ross Mounce knows that when he shares his research papers online, he may be doing something illegal — if he uploads the final version of a paper that has appeared in a subscription-based journal. Publishers who own copyright on such papers frown on their unauthorized appearance online. Yet when Mounce has uploaded his paywalled articles to ResearchGate, a scholarly social network likened to Facebook for scientists, publishers haven't asked him to take them down. "I'm aware that I might be breaching copyright," says Mounce, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. "But I don't really care."
Mounce isn't alone in his insouciance. The unauthorized sharing of copyrighted research papers is on the rise, say analysts who track the publishing industry. Faced with this problem, science publishers seem to be changing tack in their approach to researchers who breach copyright. Instead of demanding that scientists or network operators take their papers down, some publishers are clubbing together to create systems for legal sharing of articles — called fair sharing — which could also help them to track the extent to which scientists share paywalled articles online.
Sharing information is antithetical to scientific progress.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 12 2017, @06:45AM
Sure, the reality is always more complicated. But if one side makes oversimplifying statements ("copying is stealing", "sharing is piracy"), and the other side only makes solid, but complicated statements ("in many cases, the restriction of the right to copy a published work by the author or, worse, a company who bought the rights from the author, to the extent common today, is harmful to society, and when considering the overall effect, that harm does more than compensate for the advantages that come from the fact that those restrictions allow some authors to easily make an income from their works"), which side do you think will win the fight for mindshare? Indeed, I guess for the latter statement, 99% of all people will have no idea what it actually said after hearing it to the end. If they even had the patience to listen that long.
Sometimes oversimplified statements are necessary to get a point across.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.