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As a minor objection to your analysis, some of the papers they distribute are by employees of the US government. There is no copyright for those papers, therefo

by dalke 11y ago

As a minor objection to your analysis, some of the papers they distribute are by employees of the US government. There is no copyright for those papers, therefore Elsevier could not get anything signed over to time. Elsevier and all other journals charge the same price for access to these papers as they do for papers where the publisher controls the copyright. To a first approximation, that means the value of the copyright is not significant. It's a minor objection because there are few papers which are in the public domain. The publishers use contracts to prevent or limit redistribution. (I have wondered if a SciHub variant with only papers which are out of copyright or not under copyright would be viable, even on a US server. I invite someone else with money and lawyers to try it out.) Anyway, to get back to your AWS server scenerio, the parallelism doesn't work that way. In the print publication era, multiple organizations functioned as an archive for the material, including the institution library, various university libraries, and state libraries. I have gone to the local(ish) chemistry library and read publications from the 1960s without paying extra costs to read the article or make copies. I can just walk in as a member of the public and do that. However, it's more cost effective to centralize things at Elsevier (that savings to the library get passed along as profit to the publisher), Elsevier moved towards an electronic-only publication system mediated through user agreements instead of copyright, so the library cannot act as an archive, and that user agreement must extend to all users, including members of the public. (I have signed a paper to that effect, which lets me as a member of the public to access online publications but without the right to print them out or make copies.) In your AWS analogy, Elsevier/Amazon once distributed their software to anyone, and there were dozens of places willing to provide $5K/year to host those services for users of the local cloud, including anonymous hackers. Elsevier/Amazon decided to centralize, by only hosting new services on their machines rather than distribute the software. They also decided to require verified logins. So now our anonymous hacker is forced to either give up doing science, pay potentially $1,000s for legit access, or use subterfuge to do what was once inexpensive or even free, as part of a library's mission to support the public. But in real life AWS never distributed all of its code, so that others could provide AWS services, which is why your analogy doesn't really work as a metaphor for this issue.

ikeboy 11y ago
You can still go to a university and access papers for free. In fact, you can log on to their wifi anonymously, and often get access to those papers. I'm not sure why the past actions of a company as you describe would matter for current ethical questions? If Amazon had previously allowed anyone to use it for free as you describe, then upgraded and stopped allowing it, would it then be morally permissible to use hacked accounts or similar to do your computing with?
- dalke 11y ago
  "You can still go to a university and access papers for free" Yes. I don't understand why you mentioned that. I even pointed out that I could do that. "In fact, you can log on to their wifi anonymously" No, I cannot. The local college and the 1-hour-away university do not have anonymous wifi. I have signed up for a library card for non-anonymous access to the local college. It does not carry postgraduate journals in chemistry. The university does, but I am only allowed to read them from dedicated terminals. I am not allowed to copy the articles and I do not have wifi access. (Why do you think you know more about my local academic library policies than I do?) BTW, I can make InterLibrary Loan requests if I really want a copy. I believe it's about US$10/copy. "... would matter for current ethical questions" I was attempting to demonstrate how your scenario was not a good metaphor for describing the situation with scientific publications, so could not be used to clarify the ethical issues. You can stretch the metaphor to try to compensate, as you did, but there are several other factor which are also not captured: 1) people get jobs and tenure based in part on the significance of their work. Part of that is often based on where one publishes, eg, "Cell", which is an Elsevier journal, is considered to be a prestigious place to publish. Thus, short-term personal goals of advertising one's work may be at odds with long-term community goals of easy access to scientific data. 2) peer review is almost entirely done on a volunteer basis. Thus, to be useful, we would also have to posit that people's jobs depend in part on running their code on the Amazon cloud and no other cloud provider, and that most people are expected to volunteer their time to support AWS. Perhaps this is something that Bezos dreams about, but it is not the current reality. This, your AWS metaphor concerns only a part of one facet of the issue. Ethics is very clear cut when there is tunnel vision.

by dalke 11y ago

ikeboy 11y ago

You can still go to a university and access papers for free. In fact, you can log on to their wifi anonymously, and often get access to those papers. I'm not sure why the past actions of a company as you describe would matter for current ethical questions? If Amazon had previously allowed anyone to use it for free as you describe, then upgraded and stopped allowing it, would it then be morally permissible to use hacked accounts or similar to do your computing with?

dalke 11y ago
"You can still go to a university and access papers for free" Yes. I don't understand why you mentioned that. I even pointed out that I could do that. "In fact, you can log on to their wifi anonymously" No, I cannot. The local college and the 1-hour-away university do not have anonymous wifi. I have signed up for a library card for non-anonymous access to the local college. It does not carry postgraduate journals in chemistry. The university does, but I am only allowed to read them from dedicated terminals. I am not allowed to copy the articles and I do not have wifi access. (Why do you think you know more about my local academic library policies than I do?) BTW, I can make InterLibrary Loan requests if I really want a copy. I believe it's about US$10/copy. "... would matter for current ethical questions" I was attempting to demonstrate how your scenario was not a good metaphor for describing the situation with scientific publications, so could not be used to clarify the ethical issues. You can stretch the metaphor to try to compensate, as you did, but there are several other factor which are also not captured: 1) people get jobs and tenure based in part on the significance of their work. Part of that is often based on where one publishes, eg, "Cell", which is an Elsevier journal, is considered to be a prestigious place to publish. Thus, short-term personal goals of advertising one's work may be at odds with long-term community goals of easy access to scientific data. 2) peer review is almost entirely done on a volunteer basis. Thus, to be useful, we would also have to posit that people's jobs depend in part on running their code on the Amazon cloud and no other cloud provider, and that most people are expected to volunteer their time to support AWS. Perhaps this is something that Bezos dreams about, but it is not the current reality. This, your AWS metaphor concerns only a part of one facet of the issue. Ethics is very clear cut when there is tunnel vision.