4 ms·

To play devil's advocate, how is this kind of "civil disobedience" going to change the system? Why not pursue ways to legally change the system, e.g. new regul

To play devil's advocate, how is this kind of "civil disobedience" going to change the system? Why not pursue ways to legally change the system, e.g. new regulation on academic publishing?

x0x0 11y ago
it reduces what publishers have to lose and weakens their negotiating position
- thaw13579 11y ago
  My understanding is that the publishers make most of their profit through licensing to universities and libraries. Scihub doesn't seem like a viable (legal) alternative for institutions though. It probably cuts out income from one-off purchases, I guess, but I wonder how much of the pie that is...
  - x0x0 11y ago
    It allows an institution to drop small journals and cut back on licensing for bigger ones without their users feeling any pain. Nearly everyone who reads journals knows about this; institutions don't have to bring it up in contract negotiations for it to help them.
timroy 11y ago
Sci-Hub's sort of "civil disobedience" avoids the need to change the system at all, and so it doesn't matter if Sci-Hub changes the system. Hoping that over the next decade we can implement legal changes to lower the costs to the system doesn't help the researchers who need access - for their careers and for their (presumably useful) research - right now. :-) good devil's advocate question
calibraxis 11y ago
Typically, radicals & reformists work in concert. The problem is, when the reformists sell out the radicals (as with progressive Democrats and Occupy.)
dredmorbius 11y ago
It demonstrates a compelling interest and need in fixing the existing system. I think Sci-Hub is amazing. I use it myself, I've written a brief "I am a Book Thief" essay (I need to brush that up) and had some discussions. I exchanged a few emails with a reporter from Nature on my own use of Sci-Hub, though I suspect I won't appear in his piece -- I'm apparently "quite unique" as a user. Unaffiliated, doing independent research on my own. But I've got access to material I couldn't possibly otherwise obtain without phenomenally more time and cost. The ability to see a footnote and call up in a few seconds the article in question and read it to confirm understanding is simply amazing. And the amount of published information that's still not available freely online, from the 1920s onward, is, frankly, criminal. Sci-Hub doesn't change everything. Most especially, it doesn't change the current "publish-or-perish" regime in academia, nor the stranglehold "high-prestige" journals have over career advancement. For-profit journals don't just play gatekeeper over readers of papers, but over the authors. If you cannot get your work into a prestige journal, your career languishes. And those journals are almost all proprietary, commercial, closed-access. This is a key roadblock to replacing them with open-access. But Sci-Hub does but a sizeable crack in the dike. We can hope.
chris_wot 11y ago
The deck is stacked against those who want to change the system in such a way. Those who make massive profits from the existing system will fight tooth and nail to keep regulations from changing the system, and so any litigant or lobbyist for open academic publishing will be at a significant disadvantage from the very start. Basically, civil disobedience on a grand scale that changes the entire market for academic publishing is the only real way to effectively change the system for the better. Ironic really. If companies like Elsevier had charged reasonable prices for academic papers from the very start, then this would never have been as big an impact - certainly it wouldn't have been an existential threat to them. I for one won't be crying any tears when such companies are rubbed out of existence.
- thaw13579 11y ago
  The deck is stacked both ways it seems, just look to how Aaron Swartz was treated... Another thing to consider is what market forces are at play in academic publishing. For authors, the currency is prestige and career advancement, and it's not clear how scihub could change that part of the market.

To play devil's advocate, how is this kind of "civil disobedience" going to change the system? Why not pursue ways to legally change the system, e.g. new regulation on academic publishing?

x0x0 11y ago

it reduces what publishers have to lose and weakens their negotiating position

thaw13579 11y ago
My understanding is that the publishers make most of their profit through licensing to universities and libraries. Scihub doesn't seem like a viable (legal) alternative for institutions though. It probably cuts out income from one-off purchases, I guess, but I wonder how much of the pie that is...
- x0x0 11y ago
  It allows an institution to drop small journals and cut back on licensing for bigger ones without their users feeling any pain. Nearly everyone who reads journals knows about this; institutions don't have to bring it up in contract negotiations for it to help them.

timroy 11y ago

Sci-Hub's sort of "civil disobedience" avoids the need to change the system at all, and so it doesn't matter if Sci-Hub changes the system. Hoping that over the next decade we can implement legal changes to lower the costs to the system doesn't help the researchers who need access - for their careers and for their (presumably useful) research - right now. :-) good devil's advocate question

calibraxis 11y ago

Typically, radicals & reformists work in concert. The problem is, when the reformists sell out the radicals (as with progressive Democrats and Occupy.)

dredmorbius 11y ago

It demonstrates a compelling interest and need in fixing the existing system. I think Sci-Hub is amazing. I use it myself, I've written a brief "I am a Book Thief" essay (I need to brush that up) and had some discussions. I exchanged a few emails with a reporter from Nature on my own use of Sci-Hub, though I suspect I won't appear in his piece -- I'm apparently "quite unique" as a user. Unaffiliated, doing independent research on my own. But I've got access to material I couldn't possibly otherwise obtain without phenomenally more time and cost. The ability to see a footnote and call up in a few seconds the article in question and read it to confirm understanding is simply amazing. And the amount of published information that's still not available freely online, from the 1920s onward, is, frankly, criminal. Sci-Hub doesn't change everything. Most especially, it doesn't change the current "publish-or-perish" regime in academia, nor the stranglehold "high-prestige" journals have over career advancement. For-profit journals don't just play gatekeeper over readers of papers, but over the authors. If you cannot get your work into a prestige journal, your career languishes. And those journals are almost all proprietary, commercial, closed-access. This is a key roadblock to replacing them with open-access. But Sci-Hub does but a sizeable crack in the dike. We can hope.

chris_wot 11y ago

The deck is stacked against those who want to change the system in such a way. Those who make massive profits from the existing system will fight tooth and nail to keep regulations from changing the system, and so any litigant or lobbyist for open academic publishing will be at a significant disadvantage from the very start. Basically, civil disobedience on a grand scale that changes the entire market for academic publishing is the only real way to effectively change the system for the better. Ironic really. If companies like Elsevier had charged reasonable prices for academic papers from the very start, then this would never have been as big an impact - certainly it wouldn't have been an existential threat to them. I for one won't be crying any tears when such companies are rubbed out of existence.

thaw13579 11y ago
The deck is stacked both ways it seems, just look to how Aaron Swartz was treated... Another thing to consider is what market forces are at play in academic publishing. For authors, the currency is prestige and career advancement, and it's not clear how scihub could change that part of the market.