I’m ok with library Sci-Hub, but less so with Library Genesis. Pirating books reduces the incentives for authors to write more books. Pirating academic articles won’t reduce academics’ incentives to write papers.
Considering certain technical books range between 70 to 300 dollars per copy, and libraries are unable to afford them, it seems to me that the incentive system is already broken.
The publishers are very comfortable with the high prices they are able to charge the quite expensive American universities.
Good. There no reason to rewrite undergrad calculus books every semester besides money grabbing. The math hasn't changed in 100 years and there shouldn't be an incentive to write an updated version of the book for the 50th time.
Does it? It seems complicated. Higher availability of books means more readers for a start. Large numbers of people don't read at all and therefore aren't even in the market for books. Then you have to consider the absurd length of copyright. How does an author receiving money for something they wrote 50 years ago incentivise them to write more? Even worse, how does a dead author's estate receiving money incentivise anyone to write anything?
The libraries where I live are seriously a joke anyway, and even if they were not, I doubt they could compete with a website where you can find monographs addressed to like 100 people, in seconds, in your pyjamas.
That's honestly quite tragic as we don't evolve anywhere fast enough to not be hit by global depression as the digital solitude clashes with the innate human needs of real socialization.
I am not kidding at all. We have that government library app sort of thing. It makes you wait for a digital copy. Like there's a line of people before you, just like in an old school library.
Not all of us are able to, or want to, use ebooks. Especially textbooks where one may be going back and forth through chapters fairly frequently. Simply saying "muh Libgen" ignores how most people , especially teenagers, study. For teenagers, any smart device will lead to distraction if connected online. They usually choose Insta over the PDF reader in their distraction.
Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. Perhaps it's the quality of my writing but my personal experience is that even being way more concise, most people wouldn't care.
Well, how long do we work on some slide decks to convince management? How much we polish them aesthetically? This is a scientist working to convince a management board. So he puts effort in it and tries to make a convincing pitch.
I bet the editors read it not once, but several times. And I bet it was even noticed years later and posted on websites where many others read it, were impressed, and commented on it. Don Knuth’s letters are special.
It's not a real letter. It's an (implicit?) open letter that is just a self published article, with the hidden threat that everyone will see it [1] so if they don't agree they will look bad.
[1] And nobody will read it, and everybody agree even the publisher. The publisher want to increase the price anyway, and everyone else want a cheaper journal.
I think times were a little different then; when I had a company begin 2000s, we used to send long emails with details before and after meetings, and there had less and more productive meetings because everyone read these emails/docs. Now I try to send only 1 liners, because people tend to literally only read the first line and then ram the reply button and blurb some studied remark like 'ok'. And then these same folks drag out meetings asking, in a pathetic show of laziness, to 'go over the email'. If there is anything I find cringe, it's 'let's go over the email together'. It's just saying; 'I couldn't be arsed to read it and I want to waste everyone's time'.
Some people think that with quantity they can paint over a lack of substance, others think writing more looks as if they did more work, yet others don't seem to think.. at all.
Bottom line up. Ususally what you need the other side to grok can be summarized in two sentences. Start with that. Give details after. If you have multiple topics seperate them into sections or make a list.
Any message is something the receiver needs to decode into actionable information. Often the receivers don't have any idea where your mind is, so you first need to being them there. The worst kind of message is one where you need to read all the way to the end to even figure out what the heck it is about and then read it again just to get what they want.
I think this might be true if the only goal is to convey information.
Here it is more about convincing others and framing information. If you start with the condensed facts, readers who disagree might be put off already.
Because people keep throwing huge amounts of money and content to Elsevier while asking them to stop making money.
This isn't a defense of Elsevier by the way. The scholarly system is abysmal for publications and it's seemingly incapable of any meaningful change over non-geological timeframes.
But if you keep paying people to do something then they're going to keep doing it. If they stop, someone else will appear if that's the kind of thing you're funding.
What's insane to me is the biggest complaints come from three main groups - scientists, libraries/the universities that fund them, and funders. The content producers keep giving Elsevier content, the libraries keep buying it and the funders keep paying the content producers to give their content to Elsevier. Universities keep demanding academics give their content and their time for free to these journals else they don't get the progression they want.
Elsevier is a nasty symptom but a symptom non-the-less of this dysfunction. Those groups can absolutely change how things are done but the field moves glacially.
For Elsevier, Knuth was just an editor of a Journal at peak. He is not a legend for them just one of hundreds and thousands of legends they manage.
Like a (legendary) middle manager which is in the company since the start and built it up but does not agree with the current business goals of the company. We know what happens with these managers.
They don't talk to anyone unless many libraries stop paying [0]. I wonder however if those open access deals will mean the death blow to printed copies and classical libraries.
I love the veiled threat in Page 4 about Journal of Logic Programming all editors abandoning Elsevier and starting a new journal (Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)), noting the TPLP thrived after this and Elsevier's own restart having gone off the map. Especially with the balancing note at the end saying the cost per page of this new journal wasn't much cheaper.
The story goes that one of Niels Bohr's friends visited him and found him deeply engrossed in writing an application to a fund. Surprised, the friend asked why it took so long for such a prominent scientist as Bohr to write a simple application. Bohr replied, "I'm trying to make it short, but I haven't had time yet."
This is good research but terrible writing. Why are the instances so out of order? I understand starting with the first English occurrence, but why not go from there to the oldest known occurrence in any language?
> In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.
This sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't. A similar thing happened with Machine Learning (Springer) and for the same reason: the entire editorial board abandoned it and founded the Journal of Machine Learning Research (https://jmlr.org/). But Machine Learning recovered and is still a dominant factor -- and still charging high fees.
It's interesting to note that in the context of this letter about the Journal of Algorithms, that there is now an open-access journal called "Algorithms" which looks like it launched five years after this letter:
With a different set of problems imo. MDPI is a for-profit publisher with a "pay-to-publish" model, charging authors $1800 per accepted paper. And also a mixed reputation on quality, verging on a "paper mill" where they accept anything just to maximize their publication fees. Not a great model imo. There are non-profit Platinum OA journals that don't charge publication fees, like JMLR (https://www.jmlr.org/), which is the only kind of OA I consider interesting.
No, the price of ebooks is insane and getting worse. Libraries are somewhat of a captive market for publishers and they set insane costs & limit the number of times an ebook can be checked out before the library has to buy it again. IMO the cost of electronic materials to libraries is one of the biggest issues in our society that no one talks or knows about.
A price of a book is a price of the "data" inside (copyright) + price of paper, printing, binding, packing material and distribution
A price of an ebook is a price od the "data" inside (copyright) and the price of cheaper digital distributon.
So, you save on paper, boxes, trucks, you often also save on retailers (if you sell directly), and you want more money for that? No paper for me, and you also take resale options away.. and for more money?
Just the resaleability is a scam... if you bought it, you own it. If buying isn't owning (including reselling, reading on any device, etc.), then piracy isn't stealing.
I'm sure government regulation could solve both problems, but they're more interested in screwing the "normal people" instead.
It's hard to compare as the business model has changed, I believe that nowadays it's basically impossible for a library to get an individual subscription to a individual journal: subscriptions are bundled and (online) subscriptions are sold institution wide with contracts running in the millions. That's very different from what Kunth is describing, where individual libraries choosing what subscriptions they need (eg we need the JoA in our (physical) collection so we buy a subscription to that).
Readit News
And I am only half-kidding.
The publishers are very comfortable with the high prices they are able to charge the quite expensive American universities.
Every one I've seen requires login, and usually university membership for the good stuff.
Deleted Comment
Why? Just use Genesis
His addressees were members of the editorial board. Surely the editorial board should be accustomed to reading lengthy prose?
Now, writing a 14-page letter, of a quality that matches published articles, is what's wild to me.
Just a different media ;)
You really cannot understand why Donald Knuth would expect the editorial board of The Journal of Algorithms to read his letter?
[1] And nobody will read it, and everybody agree even the publisher. The publisher want to increase the price anyway, and everyone else want a cheaper journal.
Bottom line up. Ususally what you need the other side to grok can be summarized in two sentences. Start with that. Give details after. If you have multiple topics seperate them into sections or make a list.
Any message is something the receiver needs to decode into actionable information. Often the receivers don't have any idea where your mind is, so you first need to being them there. The worst kind of message is one where you need to read all the way to the end to even figure out what the heck it is about and then read it again just to get what they want.
Given the topic and my love for Knuth, I went into this paper ready to agree with him. But Knuth does a great job at stating his case.
This sentence caught my eye: "Elsevier, however, ignored my letter and did not reply" - who in their right mind would ignore a letter from Knuth?!
This isn't a defense of Elsevier by the way. The scholarly system is abysmal for publications and it's seemingly incapable of any meaningful change over non-geological timeframes.
But if you keep paying people to do something then they're going to keep doing it. If they stop, someone else will appear if that's the kind of thing you're funding.
What's insane to me is the biggest complaints come from three main groups - scientists, libraries/the universities that fund them, and funders. The content producers keep giving Elsevier content, the libraries keep buying it and the funders keep paying the content producers to give their content to Elsevier. Universities keep demanding academics give their content and their time for free to these journals else they don't get the progression they want.
Elsevier is a nasty symptom but a symptom non-the-less of this dysfunction. Those groups can absolutely change how things are done but the field moves glacially.
Because the broken rest of the system (i.e. financials tied to "how many papers did you get published") incentivizes everyone to keep the status quo.
The entire academia publishing clusterfuck needs massive government intervention to dismantle.
Like a (legendary) middle manager which is in the company since the start and built it up but does not agree with the current business goals of the company. We know what happens with these managers.
[0] https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier
> In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers...
How much does the existence of open access journals affect the affordability overall ?
A price of a book is a price of the "data" inside (copyright) + price of paper, printing, binding, packing material and distribution
A price of an ebook is a price od the "data" inside (copyright) and the price of cheaper digital distributon.
So, you save on paper, boxes, trucks, you often also save on retailers (if you sell directly), and you want more money for that? No paper for me, and you also take resale options away.. and for more money?
Just the resaleability is a scam... if you bought it, you own it. If buying isn't owning (including reselling, reading on any device, etc.), then piracy isn't stealing.
I'm sure government regulation could solve both problems, but they're more interested in screwing the "normal people" instead.