By and large, the academic publishing industry operates in such a way that it ignores the internet ever happened. The internet says, "Hey, you don't have 'Kant's Third Critique of Judgement in your inner-city school library. Here, let me tell you what it says" the academic publishing industry says "whoa- you're not at an institution that pays us money - you don't deserve to know what this says."
They try to make it seem like they do so much to push knowledge forward - but they take the paper you wrote in MSWord, take credit for the peer-review, then make it into a PDF and ask for your money.
The internet is going to destroy them and they are running scared. How long can you sustain a business that relies on paywalling PDF files?
Scholastic publishing knows the internet happened. They have published articles electronically for decades at this point.
Reproduction costs are irrelevant to scholastic publishing. A technical solution to reproduction won't change anything.
Scholastic publishers make money through their monopoly on the legitimate use of articles and books. The question is more like "how long can you sustain a business that relies on the law?". And the answer is probably: a long time.
The latter is a point that's often forgotten, and is very true. I used to do research a long time ago, prior to deciding I'm not quite academia material. If I ever get nostalgic, I literally have to pay between 30 USD and 100 USD just to get PDFs of articles that I wrote.
Of course, this is upsetting only on a personal level, but the entire process is extremely toxic to learning.
Civil disobedience is an important form of democracy. Maybe in the future, when all of our calls, messages and identities are monitored in full by our benevolent overlords, we won't be able to practice it anymore. Right or wrong, faraway anti-Western countries have served as counterweights against the West for Snowden, Assange and Elbakyan.
My biggest worry is the whole "security culture" that developed shortly after Snowden is encouraging more of the population to embrace locked-down walled-garden systems in which they can feel secure but have little freedom, and the general push for secure-by-default rather than open systems. A necessary condition for civil disobedience is the freedom to disobey, to defeat access controls, to exercise one's beliefs.
The fact that Snowden's leaks were made possible by insecurity, and now seemingly everyone is against insecurity, is ironic enough that it makes me wonder if that was really the intent all along...
> Maybe [...] we won't be able to practice it anymore.
Do you mean by suppressing the action before it occurs? I thought that one of the points of civil disobedience was to get caught, so as to increase visibility of the problem and become a catalyst for change.
The basic problem with the "original formulation" of civil disobedience is that power structures have evolved to thwart it.
Things that should by any right be a civil case or misdemeanor are instead charged as multiple overlapping felonies in order to coerce a plea bargain, which is effective to deter all but the most dedicated from demanding their day in court. Then the court won't allow you to make the case for jury nullification or any other argument that the law is wrong to the jury, and prosecutors will be allowed to exclude anyone from the jury who is sympathetic to the idea that juries shouldn't convict when they don't agree with the law.
You can only make the case that the law is wrong to the judge, and no matter how stupid the law is the judge can only agree with you if it violates the constitution. Which plenty of very, very stupid laws clearly don't, so you become a convicted felon without having had an opportunity to make your case to anyone with the power to do anything about it.
In theory the outrageous nature of that process should inspire the public to demand change, but have we passed Aaron's Law yet? [1]
>At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference.
I do mean suppressing ideas before they take root. I don't think getting caught is a necessary part of it.
The most worrisome example of today is China, which has an iron grip on the spread of ideas within the country. If China deemed Sci-Hub to be an issue, they would shut it down (via DNS poisoning) and incarcerate anybody who spoke in its favor.
I've said in a previous comment, sci-hub is pure civil disobedience of the noble kind. In fact i thought it would be impossible to ever sue her, because there is no moral argument that can outweigh what she offers. I use sci-hub all the time because my institution doesn't have access to all the sci journals, and i want access to ALL the knowledge for which millions of taxpayers have paid for (but they don't know where that knowledge ends up). Its the perfect complement to open access journals, for the (i believe) transitory period until we do away with impact factors and citation factories for good, like we did away with alchemy and phrenology.
I hope this increased publicity won't lead to shutting down the site or freeze its paypal account.
What an amazing woman. She tries to downplay her accomplishment by mentioning in the comments that she was only responsible for grabbing over 20 million papers. Nice try, but that's still a remarkable job!
Edit: not sure if the commenter is her, but she's done amazing work regardless.
Although everyone seems to celebrate it, I feel a little uneasy about this.
The whole publishing scam is not about giving (or restricting) access from research to peons, it is to justify sucking the money of public institutions.
When the situation sucks for people, they get motivated to try to change the system. It is already hard enough for people to try to change things, because research is hard enough, and then if you start to refuse publishing in unethical journals the next idiot is going to do it as well as you would.
Comparatively, many people are for the status quo regarding copyright in general because they know very well that piracy is an option. At a RMS talk, the (university!) crowd mostly unanimously cheered when he said "yes piracy" and booed when he said "... thus we have to change copyright". He was then asked "but what if hollywood disappeared with the change?".
> He was then asked "but what if hollywood disappeared with the change?".
What if they did?
It's the lie of all middle-men that they are necessary to the process. Composers didn't stop writing music when the concept of a noble benefactor died: the business model changed. Architects didn't stop building beautiful buildings because religions couldn't afford giant churches and kings stopped building palaces. Movies will continue to be made if Hollywood dies, and if history is any indicator, the art form will develop more rapidly once it's no longer hampered by outdated business models.
Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?
SCi-Hub used hacked or shared university account to abuse the university proxies to get content. For big research institutions, it's an annoyance. To small colleges and university library it is a major headache that can get the whole university locked out from resources the library is paying dearly for.
Source: My partner is a librarian at a smaller university, this happens every few months and they lose access to major online platforms for days if not longer every time.
This is an important point that is not getting adequate discussion right now. A couple of days ago, the sight was unavailable for days both on the clear-net and in the dark-web. The sight resurfaced two days ago with two levels of captcha before anyone can search the site.
What does this imply? My guess is that the site went down under an automated DDOS.
A distributed archive will ameliorate this sort of situation.
The parent comment wants to efficiently mirror the content to prevent it from disappearing in the event of a successful take down operation. This can be done by scraping an API, but bulk methods are faster and less likely to degrade service for other users.
One aspect of Aaron Swartz's case that I found both interesting and way under-reported, was that he supposedly was going to perform meta-analysis against the collected documents. And that a previous meta-analysis of a similar sort had revealed some surprising and useful results.
With all the pieces locked up, it is difficult if not impossible to do such science and statistical analysis. In other words, it is antithetical to the nature of science.
I didn't see/read enough to confirm this, in Schwartz's case. Nonetheless, I think the idea and the opinion are valid.
The Google n-gram project is an example of how one might extract useful information by indexing large numbers of documents.
You might, for example, look at trends in the use of a given scientific instrument, or with a bit of NP, when the field switched from using "computer" to mean a machine instead of a person.
It was an eye-opener to see how gendered the scientific papers were in the 1960s, where the scientist is invariably a "he" and the secretary/typist is a "she". Some simple questions I have are: how have those trends changed over time? Is it different for different subfields?
It's impossible to do that on my own when the papers cost even $1 per copy.
Also interesting, and more concerning, is that such meta-analyses are revealing biases (in the science), systemic deficiencies, and fraud. Very valuable and pertinent information to have.
Tangentially related: is anyone here familiar with automated analysis of research papers? I feel this is a field that would perfectly lend itself to machine learning, or similar approaches.
It would require extraction of meaningful data, be therein lies the rub. There are several large projects looking into collecting/sharing scientific data, mainly focusing on persuading and empowering researchers to share their full data sets.
But what can we do where the raw data is not available? Is anyone working on ways to reliably extract data from the millions of PDFs in research databases?
There are several open-ended questions here. If anyone knows of work in these areas, or is interested in this, I'd be very keen to talk.
Only materials related, but at http://www.citrine.io/ they do something like that. I recently attended a talk given by one of the team members (Bryce) and they seemed to be quite open to discussions.
Authors/Scientist have little problem with getting their work into out there to as many people
as possible. People want the knowledge. So the only ones really objecting to this are the publishers.
As someone who works at the edge of biology, I have noted that the publishing business reviews the papers get knowledgeable peer-reviewers(pressed for time) and then ask difficult questions of the authors. Some papers aren't good enough, they get rejected. This culling has some value, much as it irritates the scientists.
Scientists are always trying to get their work published/sited and ranking journals is something that happens with some regularity http://www.citefactor.org/journal-impact-factor-list-2014_0-...
Of course, want to download an article on the first genome assembly of drosophila from 15 years ago... $30. (I can access articles like this though my work in academia, if I go though the library and cross my fingers the moon is in the right phase, the the pdf link might show up).
Holding knowledge and parsing it out for profits is somewhat suspect.
I get the "joy" of uploading lots of data from screens to the us goverment pubchem website. I'm not sure anyone downloads it, but its there. They have an interesting embargo system which holds the data till publication (I've never used that, some people really care about that stuff)
Researchers in academia also pass around papers. The peer reviewers do to, if they find something interesting. We've gotten requests for data from unpublished papers.
I've found another way to get access is to simply email the author of a paper. Of course, this mostly only works for those still enrolled at the academic institution where the research took place, but I've had good luck with it.
Readit News
They try to make it seem like they do so much to push knowledge forward - but they take the paper you wrote in MSWord, take credit for the peer-review, then make it into a PDF and ask for your money.
The internet is going to destroy them and they are running scared. How long can you sustain a business that relies on paywalling PDF files?
Reproduction costs are irrelevant to scholastic publishing. A technical solution to reproduction won't change anything.
Scholastic publishers make money through their monopoly on the legitimate use of articles and books. The question is more like "how long can you sustain a business that relies on the law?". And the answer is probably: a long time.
Of course, this is upsetting only on a personal level, but the entire process is extremely toxic to learning.
The fact that Snowden's leaks were made possible by insecurity, and now seemingly everyone is against insecurity, is ironic enough that it makes me wonder if that was really the intent all along...
Do you mean by suppressing the action before it occurs? I thought that one of the points of civil disobedience was to get caught, so as to increase visibility of the problem and become a catalyst for change.
Things that should by any right be a civil case or misdemeanor are instead charged as multiple overlapping felonies in order to coerce a plea bargain, which is effective to deter all but the most dedicated from demanding their day in court. Then the court won't allow you to make the case for jury nullification or any other argument that the law is wrong to the jury, and prosecutors will be allowed to exclude anyone from the jury who is sympathetic to the idea that juries shouldn't convict when they don't agree with the law.
You can only make the case that the law is wrong to the judge, and no matter how stupid the law is the judge can only agree with you if it violates the constitution. Which plenty of very, very stupid laws clearly don't, so you become a convicted felon without having had an opportunity to make your case to anyone with the power to do anything about it.
In theory the outrageous nature of that process should inspire the public to demand change, but have we passed Aaron's Law yet? [1]
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/aarons-law-reintroduce...
>At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference.
Reflections on Gandhi
http://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/gandhi/english/e_gandhi
The most worrisome example of today is China, which has an iron grip on the spread of ideas within the country. If China deemed Sci-Hub to be an issue, they would shut it down (via DNS poisoning) and incarcerate anybody who spoke in its favor.
I hope this increased publicity won't lead to shutting down the site or freeze its paypal account.
Edit: not sure if the commenter is her, but she's done amazing work regardless.
The whole publishing scam is not about giving (or restricting) access from research to peons, it is to justify sucking the money of public institutions.
When the situation sucks for people, they get motivated to try to change the system. It is already hard enough for people to try to change things, because research is hard enough, and then if you start to refuse publishing in unethical journals the next idiot is going to do it as well as you would.
Comparatively, many people are for the status quo regarding copyright in general because they know very well that piracy is an option. At a RMS talk, the (university!) crowd mostly unanimously cheered when he said "yes piracy" and booed when he said "... thus we have to change copyright". He was then asked "but what if hollywood disappeared with the change?".
What if they did?
It's the lie of all middle-men that they are necessary to the process. Composers didn't stop writing music when the concept of a noble benefactor died: the business model changed. Architects didn't stop building beautiful buildings because religions couldn't afford giant churches and kings stopped building palaces. Movies will continue to be made if Hollywood dies, and if history is any indicator, the art form will develop more rapidly once it's no longer hampered by outdated business models.
Source: My partner is a librarian at a smaller university, this happens every few months and they lose access to major online platforms for days if not longer every time.
edit: oh http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/
With all the pieces locked up, it is difficult if not impossible to do such science and statistical analysis. In other words, it is antithetical to the nature of science. I didn't see/read enough to confirm this, in Schwartz's case. Nonetheless, I think the idea and the opinion are valid.
You might, for example, look at trends in the use of a given scientific instrument, or with a bit of NP, when the field switched from using "computer" to mean a machine instead of a person.
It was an eye-opener to see how gendered the scientific papers were in the 1960s, where the scientist is invariably a "he" and the secretary/typist is a "she". Some simple questions I have are: how have those trends changed over time? Is it different for different subfields?
It's impossible to do that on my own when the papers cost even $1 per copy.
It would require extraction of meaningful data, be therein lies the rub. There are several large projects looking into collecting/sharing scientific data, mainly focusing on persuading and empowering researchers to share their full data sets.
But what can we do where the raw data is not available? Is anyone working on ways to reliably extract data from the millions of PDFs in research databases?
There are several open-ended questions here. If anyone knows of work in these areas, or is interested in this, I'd be very keen to talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mining
Anyways, thank you very much for sharing.
As someone who works at the edge of biology, I have noted that the publishing business reviews the papers get knowledgeable peer-reviewers(pressed for time) and then ask difficult questions of the authors. Some papers aren't good enough, they get rejected. This culling has some value, much as it irritates the scientists. Scientists are always trying to get their work published/sited and ranking journals is something that happens with some regularity http://www.citefactor.org/journal-impact-factor-list-2014_0-...
Of course, want to download an article on the first genome assembly of drosophila from 15 years ago... $30. (I can access articles like this though my work in academia, if I go though the library and cross my fingers the moon is in the right phase, the the pdf link might show up).
Holding knowledge and parsing it out for profits is somewhat suspect.
Note that anything US government NIH funded since 2005 is required to have access. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/
for example. This paper, published by a coworker in an official "journal" but still available for free via pubmed. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23443684
I get the "joy" of uploading lots of data from screens to the us goverment pubchem website. I'm not sure anyone downloads it, but its there. They have an interesting embargo system which holds the data till publication (I've never used that, some people really care about that stuff)
Researchers in academia also pass around papers. The peer reviewers do to, if they find something interesting. We've gotten requests for data from unpublished papers.
I've found another way to get access is to simply email the author of a paper. Of course, this mostly only works for those still enrolled at the academic institution where the research took place, but I've had good luck with it.