6 ms·

The Rise of Pirate Libraries

132 points by fforflo 10y ago

chris_wot 10y ago
Can't say I'm sympathetic to publishers. They've been rorting the system for a long time now. When publisher substantial fund research more than government, I might start feeling differently. Of course, that will never happen as they couldn't make money. I really would like to know - what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? And why can't Universities manage the peer review system?
- Kliment 10y ago
  Universities can manage the peer review system - and many do. Many journal editorial boards have zero publisher employees and are all "volunteered" by academics. The publishers in those cases are pure gatekeepers and tax collectors.
- nkurz 10y ago
  They've been rorting the system for a long time now. I thought at first "rorting" must be a typo, but couldn't figure what was intended. Then I looked it up and found that it was exactly as intended: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rort https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rort. Seems like a useful word, although I've never heard it here in the US.
  - neonscribe 10y ago
    In this context, is "rorting" synonymous with "unfairly exploiting"?
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Pretty much. It's a term used a lot in Australia.
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        Not only as a term ;)
        chris_wot 10y ago
        Sadly, that's true.
- wlkr 10y ago
  > what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? Nothing positive, as far as I can tell. I firmly believe that they hold back the progress of the human race by limiting access to the bleeding edge of human knowledge - all for the sake of money. I'm glad people are attempting to force an overhaul of the system. An excellent article on the matter: http://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behind-a-paywall http://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behi...
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    > they hold back the progress of the human race by limiting access to the bleeding edge of human knowledge - all for the sake of money Pretty good description of Academia in general.
wsfull 10y ago
Assumption 1: the primary customers of increasingly expensive subscriptions from academic publishers are universities. Assumption 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary customers of the universities -- students. Assumption 3: assumptions 1 and 2 are correct. Question: Is there any correlation to be made between the profitability of such academic publishers with the astounding rise in university tuition in the US over the past three decades?
- shkkmo 10y ago
  Presumably some, but from what I read, much of the increase in tuition it tied to increases in administration costs.
- anon4 10y ago
  Probably, but I expect it would account for less than 0.5% of the increase. The costs of everything is passed on to the students (minus the relatively constant government subsidy, if any).
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  Assumption two seems dubious, because universities in the rest of the world pay for the same subscriptions, but don't pass these costs on to their students. It may be true for the US though.
- ommunist 10y ago
  WHo cares about the US? The collective knowledge of humanity is at stake. The keepers are restless, believe me. And most of them do not even speak English.
- csydas 10y ago
  As much as it is a broken system, in this case likely no. The actual subscriptions are cost prohibitive pretty much just to individuals and to organizations outside western Academia. The distinction of "western" is only relevant in that from what I recall working with Librarians at my last University job, the publishers do business differently with the US and parts of EU than they do elsewhere in the world. Rising tuition costs are an issue, but in relation to an academic budget, journal subscriptions will still account for a very small percent of the overall budget, even for relatively small University. The Publisher/University subscription loop, however, is indeed real and has been covered here before I believe. The short of it is that quite a few publishers are basically held together by taxpayer money in the form of continued library subscriptions. The need for a middleman in these cases is pretty questionable, as the publishers basically just host the content at this point and do no curation or peer review themselves.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Freak_NL 10y ago
Open access is being increasingly thought of as inevitable and the only ethical option for publishing academic research. What I believe we will end up with eventually is a situation where nearly all new publications are open access, and a good deal of older twentieth century (and earlier) research is publicly available as well due to ongoing digitalisation and expired copyrights. In between, there will be a significant body of research kept locked away behind paywalls by publishers trying to hold on to those cash cows and the inertia copyright on a work has once granted. At the same time, 'piracy' on a massive scale (like Sci-Hub) will only get easier due to technological advances and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to consumers worldwide. Combine that with an utter lack of sympathy for (academic) paywalls and publishers, and a widespread believe that sharing these works is ethically just, and you have a situation that simply cannot be contained. I expect that in twenty years time you will be able to download almost the complete library of published academic works from the twentieth and twenty first centuries in the time it takes to make a pot of coffee — legally or illegally. So publishers will have to learn to deal with this new reality and reinvent themselves in an open access world, or perish.
- return0 10y ago
  Journal publishing itself is awkward. It's bad use of experimental data - often you have to look at printed graphs to figure out data values not reported in the paper. Statistic power is almost never mentioned. Tons of data that could be useful to other researchers is discarded. Discussion sections tend to be overly biased. There is so much research output, it's almost impossible to refute anything and possibel to support almost anything. And so on and so on. What we need is accurate databases of research results, not more publishing. We should be rewarding scientists for the volume, integrity and significance of their data output, not for what they claim themselves in their papers.
  - msellout 10y ago
    Not all science is statistics. That's just the current paradigm and not applicable in all cases. I agree the reward system is flawed, but it ain't so easy to improve it.
  - deleted 10y ago
ommunist 10y ago
This is a hilarious piece. You yankees are good 20 years behind the real pirate libraries trend, started with lib.ru and well continued with the genesis lib and uneraseable flibista.is. Ah, I forgot to mention nehudlit.ru, which is specialized on textbooks.
- eggy 10y ago
  Good references. On the side, seeing as most of what is the internet started here (packet switching and ARPANET), and there were hacker BBSs and pirated material before Pirate Bay, I'd say we were not behind in any of these trends. And go further back to the invention of the transistor in NJ, USA, mate ;)
  - ommunist 10y ago
    Steam engine was invented well before Christ in Alexandria. However, its real life applications were really developed much later in England. Same with the Internet. What the US is holding firmly is production and sales of space-ready elements for high orbit satellites, sorry, sputniks.
    - eggy 10y ago
      I really don't like national, or jingoistic-based comparisons of contribution by country, since personally I am an individualist. I am hoping for the day we have no borders or tribes or nations (does that make me an anarchist too?). But, if lines are to be drawn, I believe you're short-changing history here a bit. The U.S. doesn't just 'holding firmly in production and sales of space-ready elements for high orbit satellites' - it innovates and funds them, and many other areas of tech. The U.S. is number one in most advanced country in space technologies. France is number three, Germany number five. The UK didn't make the top eight. Maybe the ESA would be competitive, but that is a 72-member group, not a single country. The High-Tech sector, Google, Apple, and many others is dominated by the U.S., however, that doesn't account for sheer size. In technology, R&D, tech personnel, education and patents, and accounting for per capita, it is countries like South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Israel, Germany and others. The UK is ten on that list, the US one. There is a sub-culture in China of farmers building flying tricycles, deep-sea manned submarines to collect seafood, and lots of other cool (and dangerous?) stuff. Unfortunately, they are bound by an information-filtering, state government, but oddly have freedom in the countryside to do just such crazy tinkering. Check YouTube for those items. Amazing. I have lived in SE Asia for over 7 years, and I can tell you that I sometimes feel more free to do things here than where I grew up in Brooklyn, but to a point. I would be stopped once I became 'visible'. 'Tallest blade of grass' and all that jazz!
Kristine1975 10y ago
Those are some beautiful libraries in the pictures.

132 points by fforflo 10y ago

Can't say I'm sympathetic to publishers. They've been rorting the system for a long time now. When publisher substantial fund research more than government, I might start feeling differently. Of course, that will never happen as they couldn't make money. I really would like to know - what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? And why can't Universities manage the peer review system?

Kliment 10y ago
Universities can manage the peer review system - and many do. Many journal editorial boards have zero publisher employees and are all "volunteered" by academics. The publishers in those cases are pure gatekeepers and tax collectors.
nkurz 10y ago
They've been rorting the system for a long time now. I thought at first "rorting" must be a typo, but couldn't figure what was intended. Then I looked it up and found that it was exactly as intended: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rort https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rort. Seems like a useful word, although I've never heard it here in the US.
- neonscribe 10y ago
  In this context, is "rorting" synonymous with "unfairly exploiting"?
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Pretty much. It's a term used a lot in Australia.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      Not only as a term ;)
      - chris_wot 10y ago
        Sadly, that's true.
wlkr 10y ago
> what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? Nothing positive, as far as I can tell. I firmly believe that they hold back the progress of the human race by limiting access to the bleeding edge of human knowledge - all for the sake of money. I'm glad people are attempting to force an overhaul of the system. An excellent article on the matter: http://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behind-a-paywall http://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behi...
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  > they hold back the progress of the human race by limiting access to the bleeding edge of human knowledge - all for the sake of money Pretty good description of Academia in general.

wsfull 10y ago

Assumption 1: the primary customers of increasingly expensive subscriptions from academic publishers are universities. Assumption 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary customers of the universities -- students. Assumption 3: assumptions 1 and 2 are correct. Question: Is there any correlation to be made between the profitability of such academic publishers with the astounding rise in university tuition in the US over the past three decades?

shkkmo 10y ago
Presumably some, but from what I read, much of the increase in tuition it tied to increases in administration costs.
anon4 10y ago
Probably, but I expect it would account for less than 0.5% of the increase. The costs of everything is passed on to the students (minus the relatively constant government subsidy, if any).
Freak_NL 10y ago
Assumption two seems dubious, because universities in the rest of the world pay for the same subscriptions, but don't pass these costs on to their students. It may be true for the US though.
ommunist 10y ago
WHo cares about the US? The collective knowledge of humanity is at stake. The keepers are restless, believe me. And most of them do not even speak English.
csydas 10y ago
As much as it is a broken system, in this case likely no. The actual subscriptions are cost prohibitive pretty much just to individuals and to organizations outside western Academia. The distinction of "western" is only relevant in that from what I recall working with Librarians at my last University job, the publishers do business differently with the US and parts of EU than they do elsewhere in the world. Rising tuition costs are an issue, but in relation to an academic budget, journal subscriptions will still account for a very small percent of the overall budget, even for relatively small University. The Publisher/University subscription loop, however, is indeed real and has been covered here before I believe. The short of it is that quite a few publishers are basically held together by taxpayer money in the form of continued library subscriptions. The need for a middleman in these cases is pretty questionable, as the publishers basically just host the content at this point and do no curation or peer review themselves.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Freak_NL 10y ago

Open access is being increasingly thought of as inevitable and the only ethical option for publishing academic research. What I believe we will end up with eventually is a situation where nearly all new publications are open access, and a good deal of older twentieth century (and earlier) research is publicly available as well due to ongoing digitalisation and expired copyrights. In between, there will be a significant body of research kept locked away behind paywalls by publishers trying to hold on to those cash cows and the inertia copyright on a work has once granted. At the same time, 'piracy' on a massive scale (like Sci-Hub) will only get easier due to technological advances and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to consumers worldwide. Combine that with an utter lack of sympathy for (academic) paywalls and publishers, and a widespread believe that sharing these works is ethically just, and you have a situation that simply cannot be contained. I expect that in twenty years time you will be able to download almost the complete library of published academic works from the twentieth and twenty first centuries in the time it takes to make a pot of coffee — legally or illegally. So publishers will have to learn to deal with this new reality and reinvent themselves in an open access world, or perish.

return0 10y ago
Journal publishing itself is awkward. It's bad use of experimental data - often you have to look at printed graphs to figure out data values not reported in the paper. Statistic power is almost never mentioned. Tons of data that could be useful to other researchers is discarded. Discussion sections tend to be overly biased. There is so much research output, it's almost impossible to refute anything and possibel to support almost anything. And so on and so on. What we need is accurate databases of research results, not more publishing. We should be rewarding scientists for the volume, integrity and significance of their data output, not for what they claim themselves in their papers.
- msellout 10y ago
  Not all science is statistics. That's just the current paradigm and not applicable in all cases. I agree the reward system is flawed, but it ain't so easy to improve it.
- deleted 10y ago

ommunist 10y ago

This is a hilarious piece. You yankees are good 20 years behind the real pirate libraries trend, started with lib.ru and well continued with the genesis lib and uneraseable flibista.is. Ah, I forgot to mention nehudlit.ru, which is specialized on textbooks.

eggy 10y ago
Good references. On the side, seeing as most of what is the internet started here (packet switching and ARPANET), and there were hacker BBSs and pirated material before Pirate Bay, I'd say we were not behind in any of these trends. And go further back to the invention of the transistor in NJ, USA, mate ;)
- ommunist 10y ago
  Steam engine was invented well before Christ in Alexandria. However, its real life applications were really developed much later in England. Same with the Internet. What the US is holding firmly is production and sales of space-ready elements for high orbit satellites, sorry, sputniks.
  - eggy 10y ago
    I really don't like national, or jingoistic-based comparisons of contribution by country, since personally I am an individualist. I am hoping for the day we have no borders or tribes or nations (does that make me an anarchist too?). But, if lines are to be drawn, I believe you're short-changing history here a bit. The U.S. doesn't just 'holding firmly in production and sales of space-ready elements for high orbit satellites' - it innovates and funds them, and many other areas of tech. The U.S. is number one in most advanced country in space technologies. France is number three, Germany number five. The UK didn't make the top eight. Maybe the ESA would be competitive, but that is a 72-member group, not a single country. The High-Tech sector, Google, Apple, and many others is dominated by the U.S., however, that doesn't account for sheer size. In technology, R&D, tech personnel, education and patents, and accounting for per capita, it is countries like South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Israel, Germany and others. The UK is ten on that list, the US one. There is a sub-culture in China of farmers building flying tricycles, deep-sea manned submarines to collect seafood, and lots of other cool (and dangerous?) stuff. Unfortunately, they are bound by an information-filtering, state government, but oddly have freedom in the countryside to do just such crazy tinkering. Check YouTube for those items. Amazing. I have lived in SE Asia for over 7 years, and I can tell you that I sometimes feel more free to do things here than where I grew up in Brooklyn, but to a point. I would be stopped once I became 'visible'. 'Tallest blade of grass' and all that jazz!

Kristine1975 10y ago

Those are some beautiful libraries in the pictures.