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from the on-the-one-hand-information-wants-to-be-expensive…on-the-other-hand,-information-wants-to-be-free dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Despite two lost legal battles in the US, domain name seizures, and millions of dollars in damage claims, Sci-Hub continues to offer unauthorized access to academic papers. The site's founder says that she would rather operate legally, but copyright gets in the way. Sci-Hub is not the problem she argues, it's a solution, something many academics appear to agree with.
Sci-Hub has often been referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science," but that description really sells the site short.
While both sites are helping the public to access copyrighted content without permission, Sci-Hub has also become a crucial tool that arguably helps the progress of science.
The site allows researchers to bypass expensive paywalls so they can read articles written by their fellow colleagues. The information in these 'pirated' articles is then used to provide the foundation for future research.
What the site does is illegal, according to the law, but Sci-Hub is praised by thousands of researchers and academics around the world. In particular, those who don't have direct access to the expensive journals but aspire to excel in their academic field.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-proves-that-piracy-can-be-dangerously-useful-180804/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by eravnrekaree on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:35PM (6 children)
You're wrong. The actual researchers get little or nothing from the Journal. So the researchers put in all of the work and so on, then they have to often essentially give up their copyright and hand over all of their work for a journal to profit from. If you actually wanted something to benefit researchers, the journal should be run and owned by the researchers themselves, theres no need for a middleman or upper management to rake in profits from someone elses labors. The reviewers of the articles are also non-paid usually. The journals do not benefit the actual researchers in most cases, they are not there for their benefit. They are relicts from the age when there was no internet and everything had to be printed, bound and mailed out.At that time Journals could sort of justify their existence for running the printing presses and collecting money to run all of that. All of the printing and binding and mailing is gone, replaced by very very low cost and highly commoditized internet distribution so the need for specialized scientific journals is gone, you can use basically ANY internet hosting solution. yet the journals are still there, collecting fees for distributing someone elses work, as if they still need or have printing overhead as if you still need to kill trees and run huge printing presses and mass mailing operations. the costs are gone but the profit remains so someones raking in a lot of profit and its these for profit journals and their CEOs, the researcher does not benefit.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:37PM (2 children)
No, I'm right.
The researchers get to pay for access to the journal data the publisher has published. I don't think I stated much else about the reading researcher. The publisher has the information and wants to charge for access to it. Sci-Ref wants to say the information isn't allowed to have a value placed on it by the publisher. The law supports the publishers.
Everything else I wrote, especially about financial benefits, I was discussing those who retain the rights to copy the article, i.e. the publisher. That the researchers cede copyright to the publisher changes nothing. The researchers don't factor into this discussion, really. (Other than a really GOOD team of researchers, or a team in possession of valuable information, can leverage their reputation to change the publishing contract to retain some or all of those rights. Especially after a limited period of time of publisher exclusivity.)
There is nothing prohibiting Sci-Ref, or anyone else, from setting up a journal as you've described it. Why, then, do you suppose that such efforts aren't generally successful without government backing? They typically have a run, run out of information and subscribers, and fold. (Or they discover that they have to convert to the model that has evolved over time into what we have now.) By the way... let's say you have a journal set up exactly as you describe and access fees are still charged to the readers of the article so that the journal can defuse its expenses. Is Sci-Ref still entitled to freely take that material and republish it? Do the writing researchers somehow get a more valid claim to the copyright than the publisher did by contract?
Another correction: It doesn't reflect a pre-internet age. If it did, they would not survive today. Actually it reflects the ethical value that one performs and publishes research as a contribution back to the profession in which one participates in. One consuming the research pays for the access to it. Not exactly altruism, but altruism fits into that model. Doctor makes living seeing patients, not conducting research, for example. Scientist needs to be recognized as expert, and gets prestige from publishing in Journal X, but all compensation isn't finanacial. It is more a relic from the age when there were very few, if any, "professional researchers." One that still carries through today. And there isn't any guarantee that there should be or that researchers should be supported by the publishing system. (If you want that, write a textbook).
The publisher takes the profits because it is the publisher who puts up the financial risk in having a staff who edits and publishes the material in a collected form. Whether paper or electronically there are expenses. Whether those expenses (publisher's staff time) is waived, the expense is still there on the books as hours put in. (And I dispute what you're saying that distributing electronically is low-cost. Possibly lower cost than paper. But it sounds like you've never dealt with an ISP on a commercial distribution server where you pay for the data people are accessing from you. I haven't either, but I'm not naive enough to expect web hosting on a commercial data distribution scale is free.) A successful publisher/journal also exploits their popularity and success by charging premiums for access.
Again, there is nothing prohibiting any person from setting up their own website and publishing their results. For free or behind a paywall. But unless you personally have the draw to your name you won't be very successful charging for access to your own research. You can publish for free, but so can anybody else on the Internet. So yep, we still need the publishing industry and their interests are needing to be protected. For now.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:48PM (1 child)
> The publisher takes the profits because it is the publisher who puts up the financial risk in having a staff who edits and publishes the material in a collected form.
Ahahaha.
Your information is ~20-30 years out of date. There is no financial risk whatsoever, and profit margins are larger than Apple's.
> Again, there is nothing prohibiting any person from setting up their own website and publishing their results.
Almost every single researcher does this. Betting the progress of humanity on tens of thousands of individual homepages, that can disappear at any moment, is fucking stupid.
> But unless you personally have the draw to your name you won't be very successful charging for access to your own research.
Are you truly so stupid and divorced from reality? Currently, NO RESEARCHER IS GETTING PAID FOR THEIR PAPERS. Quite the opposite: RESEARCHERS NEED TO PAY TO THE PUBLISHER TO SUBMIT PAPERS.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:47PM
Wrong. There is lesser risk for an established publisher. But all it takes to make the established publishers unprofitable, legally, is to replace what they do. You can do that yourself, can't you? No? Then there is risk in being a publisher. Just because your risk and Elsevier's are different doesn't invalidate the point.
Witness all sorts of journals that start up and go out of print.
And it won't surprise me if something does come along to replace the academic publishing industry. But it won't come by theft as SciHub does it. PLOS, maybe someday. PubMed. All are threats to the profit-journal system. None are quite there yet.
A publishing powerhouse makes its profits from economy of scale, BTW. They've put up the investment and risk to be able to have that scale.
Almost every single researcher does this? Then what's the problem? I think what you meant is that every researcher has their own website, where they might share their papers that they have copyright over or where copyright has returned to them. And yes, I agree that relying on individual homepages for progress is stupid. Which is why we still have publishers. Do-doy! You have a better solution that currently and actually works besides allowing SciHub to steal them and publish them themselves? Great! Let's hear it!
Exactly. That's my point. You have the complete freedom to publish your own information, free or for charge, on your own website. You won't find anybody to pay for it if you just publish it yourself, and publishing it yourself free gives you no more cachet than anybody else on the Internet. It's yours, but it's useless. To both society and as an income stream.
So what's your problem that publishers can create value and charge for it? That the author doesn't get paid? They won't with SciHub, either. They don't if they self-publish.
And, BTW, if you need to pay a publisher to publish your work you are dealing with a predatory publisher, same as any other vanity publisher. Genuine journals usually don't pay the researcher, but neither does the researcher pay. That won't stop someone desperate for publish-or-perish from buying into vanity publishing.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:13PM (2 children)
> The actual researchers get little or nothing from the Journal.
Exposure. Which is critical to future grants.
The peer review process is supposed to guarantee the reader that they are not investing their limited time reading bollocks.
Anybody can self-publish, but it's akin to selling your DangDongSki car to rich people who want the proven reliability of a Lexus.
Does it suck ? Yes.
Can you dismiss it as a giant waste ? Until some big credible organization creates a reliable peer-reviewed database of content, the incumbents are what's trusted, and therefore what will keep being used.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 15 2018, @02:31PM (1 child)
Guy I work with had a Lexus. Sold it after a year because it kept breaking down and cost an arm and a leg each time. He got a Nissan instead.
Which would seem to be missing the point...except I don't think it is really, because:
This part doesn't seem to be doing its job properly, as a lot of these "reviewed" studies are still junk:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/02/04/011259 [soylentnews.org]
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/12/29/046254 [soylentnews.org]
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/08/29/1226237 [soylentnews.org]
Yeah, that "trust" is part of the problem, not the solution. It is one of the misguided beliefs that is preventing a better system from replacing these journals.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday August 15 2018, @04:57PM
You notice that I did put all the weasel words to show that what the system is supposed to be, knowing well that it's barely passable in practice.