Documentary puts lens on the open-access movement upending scientific publishing
Jason Schmitt was working at Atlantic Records when the online site Napster disrupted the music industry by making copyrighted songs freely available. Now, the communications and media researcher at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, is pushing for a similar disruption of academic publishing with Paywall, a documentary about the open-access movement that debuts today in a Washington, D.C., theater. "I don't think that it's right that for-profit publishers can make 35%–40% profit margins. The content is provided for them for free by academics," Schmitt, who produced the film, says.
The documentary explores the impact of Sci-Hub, a website that provides pirated versions of paywalled papers for free online, and interviews academics and publishing figures. Schmitt says many large publishers refused to go on camera—although representatives from Science and Nature did—and he is not impressed that several have begun publishing some open-access journals. "Elsevier is as much to open access as McDonald's fast food is to healthy," he says.
Sci-Hub and Library Genesis.
Related:
The Research Pirates of the Dark Web
Wellcome Trust Recommends Free Scientific Journals
Sci-Hub, the Repository of "Infringing" Academic Papers Now Available Via "Telegram"
Research Libraries Announce Boycott of Elsevier Journals Over Open Access
Elsevier Wants $15 Million Piracy Damages from Sci-Hub and Libgen
US Court Grants Elsevier Millions in Damages From Sci-Hub
Sci-Hub Faces $4.8 Million Piracy Damages and ISP Blocking
Virginia District Court Demands that ISPs and Search Engines Block Sci-Hub
Sci-Hub Bounces from TLD to TLD
Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can be Dangerously Useful
Plan S: Radical Open-Access Science Initiative in Europe
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 10 2018, @11:04PM
> You should never shit on other people's fortune.
Reality is raining on their parade. If anything, we're propping them up, helping them deny reality. That most certainly should stop.
However, they've been pretty skillful at manipulating the public into buying their nonsense, playing on people's fear of loss. They dangle in front of everyone the possibility that you too might become a famous author and strike it rich-- if, that is, copyright is still strong.
Where they really screwed up was the terrorism campaign, accusing half the world of piracy, calling us all thieves, threatening to sue. Such debacles as SCO Unix trying to shake down every Linux user for a license, for only $699, patent trolls and then these so-called rights holder organizations suing over works that they don't actually own, and the MAFIAA trying to turn ISPs and colleges into intellectual property police-- all that massive overreaching ultimately served to show only that they are unreasonable, and seem utterly clueless about that. Big Pharma and Monsanto also trying to catch this wave only makes it worse for them. Academic publishers such as Elsevier are really bit players in this, but the extreme unreasonableness of their parasitism is getting them a lot of bad press.