Tim Gowers offers some background to the overwhelming case for open access publication. Sci-hub is an example of an almost inevitable reaction to the blatant profiteering by certain academic publishers. Let's remember that in the main, taxpayers across the world, through their governments, almost alone, pay for the very expensive business of carrying out university and institutional research and preparing manuscripts for publication.
And they pay for it multiple times over. They pay once for the researchers carrying out the work, and then they pay again for the reviewers, who provide their peer review services for free (i.e., not paid by the journal). Then, they pay for it a third time when universities (the government-funded ones, at least) have to pay exorbitant subscription fees to access the research.
And a fourth time on a per-article basis if you, as an individual, non-academic taxpayer, would like you read the very research your taxes have funded.
Peer review is the whole point of a journal and yet they do not get paid for their invaluable work. They should just form their own group so they can review academic works independently and publish online. There is no reason to have "journals" anymore.
It seems like open access doesn't really solve the problem of paying more than necessary though. Open access means that if a country funds a particular piece of research then they're funding that piece for the entire world. Why shouldn't the information be at least limited enough that the society ('societies' if it's a partnership) funding the research is the one to take the profits?
I think there’s some commingling in this argument. When an institution subscribed they are getting access to research done by _other_ institutions. Presumably they have their own records of their own research.
I think the fundamental problem is that academics historically gave away their copyright [1]:
> Traditionally, the author of an article was required to transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers claimed this was necessary in order to protect author's rights, and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish instead.
I'd love to learn more about how this system evolved.
Because those academics were (and are) a bunch of egotistical, money-grubbing fools who would rather sell up their scientific integrity in exchange for some imaginary 'reputation' points.
Science is science, it shouldn't matter where it's published.
Science is not science. There is a lot of garbage being produced, you need a way to sort through it. Hierarchies of journals or conferences will naturally emerge regardless of the payment model. Just check the field of machine learning where most papers are open access and yet prestige depends on where it's published. This is orthogonal to the matter at hand.
Being published by prestigious journals isn't just about ego, it's about future career opportunities, getting grants, getting to work on things you want to work on possibly with some of the most brilliant people in your field.
I think people at the top could make things change with a massive concerted effort, and I think things will change naturally as younger people who've had a taste of open acess get access to top positions but it's too reductive to put things down to researchers' greed and ego.
But it does, there's a limited amount of hours in the day and an infinite amount of papers. You need someone to pre-screen the torrent of crap that has an occasional jewel floating in it, and traditionally journal editors have served that role.
In my former life as a research engineer I learned to avoid no-name publishers, institutions, and conference proceedings because they are filled with lies. Not poor caliber material - outright fabrications.
That's not to say prestigious journals are immune from bad science, just that the consequences for fraud are a bit worse and bar to clear for publishing it much higher.
The vast majority of academics are underpaid workers in precarious jobs who need those publications because securing one of the few stable positions is explicitly tied to having enough imaginary points.
Patents and copyrights in many cases have become a tumor, destroying their original purposes to enable rent seeking from disgusting and harmful organizations.
Yes, it's disgusting. Intellectual property in general makes little sense but copyright in particular is just so bad. It's gotten to the point copyright infringement is civil disobedience. People should just do it, consequences be damned, until governments get rid of these outdated laws.
Every time I tried to find reasons for their continued existence strong enough to outweigh obvious downsides, I was met with utter failure.
Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties.
Patron and Kickstarter have shown that we are very much capable of funding artists remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the latter.
As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined); as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they administer).
I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and tanking the higher bandwidth costs).
Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose.
As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum, financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if it ever happens to get sold.
It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction, where the study administrators calculate the required budget, and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't happen.
I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system.
In the movie industry, people would put their money where their mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall get a first season.
There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an example.
> It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties.
I would expect the exact opposite. Do you have any data? I’d expect the primary money maker for artists is people buying their products or getting those products from the channels the artist chooses. E.g buying a dvd or watching my show on Netflix or watching my video on my YouTube channel or buying a print of my drawing.
Patreon processes payments of less than a billion dollars per year, so artists’ money seems to be, by far, made via copyright protection.
There’s a question about what fraction of artists make a living, and I expect the majority don’t make a living from it. Most artists probably don’t do it for the money. Most probably just have it as a hobby. That said I’m glad some artists can make a living at it.
I have yet to see any evidence that switching to a copyright free world would help anyone but the hobbyists and big companies who can afford to exploit the fruits of the hobbyists labors (I imagine some kind of YouTube like company going around taking everyone’s content and putting it in a central place and making bank off ads).
You seem to be getting at this with your mention about the need for “anti-tivoization” regulation. When you flesh that out, trying to regulate away the worst exploitative practices and enabling a professional class of artists, you’d end up with something that looks a lot like copyright law.
I agree with everything you said here pretty much. The way I would address the problem is to perhaps outright get rid of patents, limit copyright to 5 years, eliminate any ability to copyright software, and allow for trademarks as that is just the identifier for a specific brand.
The argument a layman would make in favour of this is:
"if people know they could rent seek with their intellectual property and potentially make millions of dollars charging people for licenses / gatekeeping their work, well that's going to motivate them to create really good work! Without this motivation, no one would create good work"
And it's like, ignoring all the well-established counter-arguments to this, it kind of seems to justify its own existence through contradiction. It says, in essence, "We have to coerce people into making really good work by not giving them the building blocks that they could use to make really good work"
I cannot tell you how hilarious it is to me that the by-far-easiest part of research - the incredibly trivial act of posting a paper on a website - is the only part that is privatized and immensely profitable
I would be more supportive of their cause if Libgen was limited to academic books, but I've found nearly every fiction/nonfiction book I've wanted to on there; it was just a standard book piracy website to me.
The case for textbooks is much weaker than papers as, although it's basically implied that most won't make any money, it's an almost herculean task to write a good textbook (of 1k pages let's say).
I steal all my papers (I am a member of the tyre society - ladies queue up please... - because it's so obscure I can't find them on Sci-Hub) but I don't mind paying for textbooks on principle.
The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new edition every other year, with slightly different pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price.
In the past, prices were more reasonable, and you'd buy standard texts to build a personal library because you'd enter the profession; nowadays it's all about fleecing students, who need a college degree to enter the workforce. The social contract around textbooks has broken down as much as it has around journals.
Among the strongest counterarguments to the textbooks case is the law article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright", written by an academic and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1970. The author argued three principle points:
- That the only defensible justification of copyright is a consequentialist economic balance between maximizing the distribution of works and encouraging their production.
- That there is significant historical, logical, and anecdotal evidence which shows that exclusive rights will provide only limited increases in the volume of literary production, particularly within certain sections of the book market.
- That there was limited justification for contemporary expansions in the scope and duration of copyright.
A substantial portion of the analysis is directed to the textbook market.
Copyright at the time of publication required registration, and was for a term of 28 years, renewable for an additional term, so or 54 years, lapsing four years from now in 2024. Subsequent copyright revisions have extended by 41 years, to a total duration of 95 years, expiring in 2065. Best I can tell, copyright is held by the Harvard Law Review Association, rather than the author, presently Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer.
Though the article is available via LibGen (or Sci-Hub).
Well authors also want to make money, so we have to choose between having high quality writing that people get paid for or free low quality writing that people don't get paid for.
A lot of people arguing about scientists should just publish to their “group” journal for free.
You all are missing a key piece though, these scientists are trained / conditioned to believe that getting “published in a top paid journal” is prestigious so they jump at the chance to do it.
We simultaneously need a campaign to make publishing in these paid journals unsexy _and_ have it be freely published.
Just my own 2c, part of what makes this whole thing so frustrating & confounding is that it's hard to tell how valuable a paper is going to be to you until you've read it. Reading abstracts gives some idea, but there's plenty of papers that end up being not that interesting. Given the extreme price these journals charge for individual access, the it becomes extremely hard to survey & locate & subsequently purchase relevant research.
90% of papers I read turn out useless. I have a hard time finding good review articles among all that watered-down garbage. If I had to pay to view each one or even subscribe...I wouldn’t get too far.
it is for this reason that I am biased to papers from the 90s and earlier (for certain fields). when there are less papers churned out of desperation to fulfill university degree requirements or yet another use case report of a third party's framework/library.
Readit News
Tim Gowers offers some background to the overwhelming case for open access publication. Sci-hub is an example of an almost inevitable reaction to the blatant profiteering by certain academic publishers. Let's remember that in the main, taxpayers across the world, through their governments, almost alone, pay for the very expensive business of carrying out university and institutional research and preparing manuscripts for publication.
> Traditionally, the author of an article was required to transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers claimed this was necessary in order to protect author's rights, and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish instead.
I'd love to learn more about how this system evolved.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic...
Science is science, it shouldn't matter where it's published.
Being published by prestigious journals isn't just about ego, it's about future career opportunities, getting grants, getting to work on things you want to work on possibly with some of the most brilliant people in your field.
I think people at the top could make things change with a massive concerted effort, and I think things will change naturally as younger people who've had a taste of open acess get access to top positions but it's too reductive to put things down to researchers' greed and ego.
But it does, there's a limited amount of hours in the day and an infinite amount of papers. You need someone to pre-screen the torrent of crap that has an occasional jewel floating in it, and traditionally journal editors have served that role.
That's not to say prestigious journals are immune from bad science, just that the consequences for fraud are a bit worse and bar to clear for publishing it much higher.
Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties. Patron and Kickstarter have shown that we are very much capable of funding artists remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the latter.
As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined); as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they administer).
I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and tanking the higher bandwidth costs).
Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose.
As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum, financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if it ever happens to get sold.
It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction, where the study administrators calculate the required budget, and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't happen.
I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system.
In the movie industry, people would put their money where their mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall get a first season.
There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an example.
I would expect the exact opposite. Do you have any data? I’d expect the primary money maker for artists is people buying their products or getting those products from the channels the artist chooses. E.g buying a dvd or watching my show on Netflix or watching my video on my YouTube channel or buying a print of my drawing.
Patreon processes payments of less than a billion dollars per year, so artists’ money seems to be, by far, made via copyright protection.
There’s a question about what fraction of artists make a living, and I expect the majority don’t make a living from it. Most artists probably don’t do it for the money. Most probably just have it as a hobby. That said I’m glad some artists can make a living at it.
I have yet to see any evidence that switching to a copyright free world would help anyone but the hobbyists and big companies who can afford to exploit the fruits of the hobbyists labors (I imagine some kind of YouTube like company going around taking everyone’s content and putting it in a central place and making bank off ads).
You seem to be getting at this with your mention about the need for “anti-tivoization” regulation. When you flesh that out, trying to regulate away the worst exploitative practices and enabling a professional class of artists, you’d end up with something that looks a lot like copyright law.
"if people know they could rent seek with their intellectual property and potentially make millions of dollars charging people for licenses / gatekeeping their work, well that's going to motivate them to create really good work! Without this motivation, no one would create good work"
And it's like, ignoring all the well-established counter-arguments to this, it kind of seems to justify its own existence through contradiction. It says, in essence, "We have to coerce people into making really good work by not giving them the building blocks that they could use to make really good work"
I steal all my papers (I am a member of the tyre society - ladies queue up please... - because it's so obscure I can't find them on Sci-Hub) but I don't mind paying for textbooks on principle.
In the past, prices were more reasonable, and you'd buy standard texts to build a personal library because you'd enter the profession; nowadays it's all about fleecing students, who need a college degree to enter the workforce. The social contract around textbooks has broken down as much as it has around journals.
- That the only defensible justification of copyright is a consequentialist economic balance between maximizing the distribution of works and encouraging their production.
- That there is significant historical, logical, and anecdotal evidence which shows that exclusive rights will provide only limited increases in the volume of literary production, particularly within certain sections of the book market.
- That there was limited justification for contemporary expansions in the scope and duration of copyright.
A substantial portion of the analysis is directed to the textbook market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright
Copyright at the time of publication required registration, and was for a term of 28 years, renewable for an additional term, so or 54 years, lapsing four years from now in 2024. Subsequent copyright revisions have extended by 41 years, to a total duration of 95 years, expiring in 2065. Best I can tell, copyright is held by the Harvard Law Review Association, rather than the author, presently Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer.
Though the article is available via LibGen (or Sci-Hub).
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.2307%2F1339714
Just my own 2c, part of what makes this whole thing so frustrating & confounding is that it's hard to tell how valuable a paper is going to be to you until you've read it. Reading abstracts gives some idea, but there's plenty of papers that end up being not that interesting. Given the extreme price these journals charge for individual access, the it becomes extremely hard to survey & locate & subsequently purchase relevant research.