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A general discussion about piracy seems very off-topic. If we're talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional
by Obi_Juan_Kenobi 11y ago
A general discussion about piracy seems very off-topic.
If we're talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional access to journals, proper research of a subject is ludicrously expensive. In writing a publication, I generally use about 50-100 citations, and yes, you actually have to read them. And for every one that you did use, there are one or two that you didn't. So, simply putting together a manuscript would cost on the order of $5,000-10,000. In actual practice, this is something like a month of searching and reading papers. To sustain that rate is obviously impractical.
This makes those without institutional access completely deprived of useful access to the world's research. It's a terrible, indefensible situation.
- bcook 11y agoWe argue about the background color of a linked article with little resistance, so I think a post about general piracy within an article about academic piracy is relatively on-topic (but I know that is subjective). I agree that the current journal/paper fee is crazy, but to say that piracy is the "obvious" answer is short-sighted, in my opinion. I very much enjoy the conversation though. My experience with academia is very limited, but I happily used sci-hub & libgen when I was researching the Hierarchical Fair Service Curve paper.
- dalke 11y ago> In writing a publication ... And then the reviewer says "you should compare this to papers X, Y, and Z", each of which costs $35+ for a non-subscriber to read.