7 ms·

While I support open science and Sci-Hub is great, I also can see publisher's side. Imagine the same site with pirated high quality scientific books. (There ar

While I support open science and Sci-Hub is great, I also can see publisher's side. Imagine the same site with pirated high quality scientific books. (There are some, but in darker corners of the Internet). Would open access to these books be advantageous for humanity? Most definitely. Will publishers get mad about it? Even more definitely. Should publisher's work be free? I think not. However, you can't get both sides of the coin at once. Either authors are paying publishers to get their papers peer reviewed and published (they do now), or publishers may collect payments from readers and libraries. Not both ways.

rainforest 11y ago
> Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated?
- mkohlmyr 11y ago
  Presumably the value in a journal publisher is: a) it's name, being accepted to certain journals is an indicator of quality b) to readers who are guaranteed published works have been peer reviewed That being said I'm not a massive fan and I believe there is probably a model whereby you can get these value-adds without the closed down subscription system. Publicly funded research should be publicly available.
  - vixen99 11y ago
    Sorry but its name!
- raphman_ 11y ago
  > What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated? - organizing peer review - spell-checking and fixing layout problems - making sure that the paper stays available for a long time - handling complaints and retracting fraudulent papers - providing a single point of contact for people who would like to reuse published material (e.g., using illustrations in a textbook). Sure, many publishers don't do a very good job for the money they are taking. Sure, there might be better approaches for disseminating knowledge than the current one. However, in the world as it is now, publishers can and do provide some value.
  - dempseye 11y ago
    I was once tangentially involved in the preparation of a journal. All those things you listed were done for free by professors and grad students.
  - gipsies 11y ago
    - At least in computer science, it's generally professors who organise the peer review (the Program Commitee) - I've heard from several collegues that the editor introduced spelling mistakes. Sure, overall they might get some errors out, but a spellcheck is not needed. - Well yes. But there is no need for that to be expensive. - Do we need them for this? If there really is fraud, previous cases show it's their university that starts an investigation. I'm not sure if the effect of retracting a paper is that significant.. - If all papers were public in the first place, there is no need to contact someone if it's okay to reuse material. Anyway publishers might provide some value, but not enough to demand we pay for every single paper, or pay costly subscriptions. They need to die already or adept.
    - raphman_ 11y ago
      I agree with your general perspective. (I have publicly vowed to never act as a reviewer for Elsevier, for example.) However, ignoring the traditional role of publishers does not help our case. Regarding your individual points: - Peer review for CS conferences is usually organized by volunteers, yes. However, this is not true for other, journal-focused disciplines, where there are paid assistants - One might argue that spelling/layout checks are not really necessary. I personally appreciate them. In any case, these _are_ services that publishers usually offer. - I was not trying to argue that the typical publisher does a good or cheap job. What I wanted to say is that publishers can and do add value. - Universities usually try to handle scientific fraud discretely (for PR, HR, and legal reasons). They are usually not interested in disseminating bad news widely. - Sure, if we could retroactively bring all previously published works into the public domain, things would be much easier. However, in the copyright system we live in right now, publishers provide a useful service by taking care of author's rights and facilitating reuse.
      - 11y ago
jessriedel 11y ago
> Imagine the same site with pirated high quality scientific books. (There are some, but in darker corners of the Internet). Library genesis isn't that dark of a corner these days. http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://golibgen.io/ http://golibgen.io/
tmptmp 11y ago
>>Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What exact work these publishers are doing? How much are they demanding for that? Who is funding the research? Who is doing the work? These publishers are just mean middlemen who are trying to extract as much money as they can/want from both the authors and the readers. Now is the time to get rid of them.
- refurb 11y ago
  What exact work these publishers are doing? Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal? The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > That means these journals offer something of value to them. Prestige, obviously. The other services are marginally valuable. Honestly, I wish a big foundation would agree to simply underwrite any such costs (to remove these as an objection). The whole value of publishers is in their accumulated brand value. A brand value which they did not build themselves but instead gathered from decades of harvesting public resources.
    - refurb 11y ago
      Public resources? How do you figure? Not all research public is a public resource. Pharmaceutical companies publish, as do private foundations. Anyways, if the research was funded through public money, it gets published for free anyways.
      - morgante 11y ago
        > Anyways, if the research was funded through public money, it gets published for free anyways. It does? I'm genuinely curious. The vast majority of research is funded with public money (to some extent). Where is all this publicly-funded research published?
saganus 11y ago
Some of the arguments I've read against publishers are along the lines that they take papers that were funded with public money, and thus in theory are in the public domain, yet they charge an arm and a leg for that information while at the same time preventing anyone else from distributing the free versions. So how is it that they are entitled to be payed for something they didn't create or even own for that matter? Maybe if they did actually offered an added value service, then the freebie version would be inferior and would be no need to block them from being distributed, since people would just pick their own enhanced (curated?) versions. As far as I understand it, Elsevier should only have a say on content they actually own the copyright for, which could be a lot of papers, but if I understand correctly SciHub was publishing papers that were funded with public money, is it not? or are they also hosting papers for which the copyright is actually owned by someone else?
vibrio 11y ago
With the advent of the internet, the marginal cost of producing and distributing such content has dropped by orders of magnitude since the 1990's. One would expect in a competitive, healthy economic system, some of this productivity gain would fall to customers in lower prices. This has not happened. While piracy is not the ultimate answer, it may be necessary to force the hand of the businesses and government to restructure. I don't know how/how much publishers should be compensated, but they will not give up their current rent-seeking status unless it is ripped from their cold dead hands. Information production/distribution has become a commodity, and should be priced only to support the value add of peer-review, etc. Meanwhile should authors be compensated? Yes, As an observation from the corner of science that i inhabit: authorship of 'high quality scientific books' is a 'secondary profession' with most authors having primary commitments to academic positions--which are very much enriched by authorship. I believe authors will continue to be compensated both directly and indirectly, as they are providing most of the value in the product.
morgante 11y ago
The book example is not very helpful for a few reasons. Firstly, the authors of books do get paid—writing books is not a pure tax imposed by academia. Secondly, books are not typically at the frontier of scientific knowledge (these days). They're interesting and helpful, but accessing them is not a necessity for keeping up to date. Put simply, books do not have a monopoly on knowledge. Finally, and most importantly, books are not funded by the public. Research is. If the public is paying for something, they should have access to it.
freddref 11y ago
> Should publisher's work be free? Publishers work is not needed, it can be distributed among authors who can do it at a negligible cost.
Luc 11y ago
Billions, man. They're making billions per year in profit. 'Should publisher's work be free?' is not the right question. Their service is so far from free it's indecent.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  > They're making billions per year in profit. 'Should publisher's work be free?' is not the right question. I don't understand the logic. We shouldn't ask if the work of people making billions should be free? That seems like exactly the sort of people of whom we should be asking it.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>Imagine the same site with pirated high quality scientific books. Imagine if publishers went and banned libraries, because only those who can afford books should be allowed to read them.
- krapp 11y ago
  Libraries pay for their books, which is why they have the legal right to lend them.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    A pirated book likely came from a purchased original.
    - krapp 11y ago
      Yes, a pirated book is often a illegal copy of a legal original. But every copy in a library is legally paid for - and they expect you to return the copies you borrow when you're done with them, because they would have to buy more otherwise. Libraries don't undermine copyright law, they depend on it for their survival.
      - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        But the damages are still done. By having a library where people can get a book for free instead of buying it, even though there is some throughput limits, they still make it so that the media is no longer consumed. Imagine a pirating service which ensures that a given file is only being consumed by one machine at a time. So if I want to watch the newest blockbuster, I have to wait my turn, and once watched, I cannot watch it again (without getting in line). In effect, the movie is checked out a single instance at a time, just like how a library checks out a single book at a time.
        krapp 11y ago
        The real damage from piracy comes from distribution, rather than consumption. Lending might do a small amount of damage, but as long as the inventory publishers have has been paid for somehow, they don't really care. They would care if libraries started running printing presses in the back and gave away extra copies for free, which were indistinguishable from the original, which is essentially the piracy model. IANAL but I'm honestly not even certain that the piracy service you describe would actually be illegal, or at least that it couldn't be done legally.

rainforest 11y ago

> Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated?

mkohlmyr 11y ago
Presumably the value in a journal publisher is: a) it's name, being accepted to certain journals is an indicator of quality b) to readers who are guaranteed published works have been peer reviewed That being said I'm not a massive fan and I believe there is probably a model whereby you can get these value-adds without the closed down subscription system. Publicly funded research should be publicly available.
- vixen99 11y ago
  Sorry but its name!
raphman_ 11y ago
> What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated? - organizing peer review - spell-checking and fixing layout problems - making sure that the paper stays available for a long time - handling complaints and retracting fraudulent papers - providing a single point of contact for people who would like to reuse published material (e.g., using illustrations in a textbook). Sure, many publishers don't do a very good job for the money they are taking. Sure, there might be better approaches for disseminating knowledge than the current one. However, in the world as it is now, publishers can and do provide some value.
- dempseye 11y ago
  I was once tangentially involved in the preparation of a journal. All those things you listed were done for free by professors and grad students.
- gipsies 11y ago
  - At least in computer science, it's generally professors who organise the peer review (the Program Commitee) - I've heard from several collegues that the editor introduced spelling mistakes. Sure, overall they might get some errors out, but a spellcheck is not needed. - Well yes. But there is no need for that to be expensive. - Do we need them for this? If there really is fraud, previous cases show it's their university that starts an investigation. I'm not sure if the effect of retracting a paper is that significant.. - If all papers were public in the first place, there is no need to contact someone if it's okay to reuse material. Anyway publishers might provide some value, but not enough to demand we pay for every single paper, or pay costly subscriptions. They need to die already or adept.
  - raphman_ 11y ago
    I agree with your general perspective. (I have publicly vowed to never act as a reviewer for Elsevier, for example.) However, ignoring the traditional role of publishers does not help our case. Regarding your individual points: - Peer review for CS conferences is usually organized by volunteers, yes. However, this is not true for other, journal-focused disciplines, where there are paid assistants - One might argue that spelling/layout checks are not really necessary. I personally appreciate them. In any case, these _are_ services that publishers usually offer. - I was not trying to argue that the typical publisher does a good or cheap job. What I wanted to say is that publishers can and do add value. - Universities usually try to handle scientific fraud discretely (for PR, HR, and legal reasons). They are usually not interested in disseminating bad news widely. - Sure, if we could retroactively bring all previously published works into the public domain, things would be much easier. However, in the copyright system we live in right now, publishers provide a useful service by taking care of author's rights and facilitating reuse.
    - 11y ago

jessriedel 11y ago

> Imagine the same site with pirated high quality scientific books. (There are some, but in darker corners of the Internet). Library genesis isn't that dark of a corner these days. http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://golibgen.io/ http://golibgen.io/

tmptmp 11y ago

>>Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What exact work these publishers are doing? How much are they demanding for that? Who is funding the research? Who is doing the work? These publishers are just mean middlemen who are trying to extract as much money as they can/want from both the authors and the readers. Now is the time to get rid of them.

refurb 11y ago
What exact work these publishers are doing? Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal? The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.
- morgante 11y ago
  > That means these journals offer something of value to them. Prestige, obviously. The other services are marginally valuable. Honestly, I wish a big foundation would agree to simply underwrite any such costs (to remove these as an objection). The whole value of publishers is in their accumulated brand value. A brand value which they did not build themselves but instead gathered from decades of harvesting public resources.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Public resources? How do you figure? Not all research public is a public resource. Pharmaceutical companies publish, as do private foundations. Anyways, if the research was funded through public money, it gets published for free anyways.
    - morgante 11y ago
      > Anyways, if the research was funded through public money, it gets published for free anyways. It does? I'm genuinely curious. The vast majority of research is funded with public money (to some extent). Where is all this publicly-funded research published?

saganus 11y ago

Some of the arguments I've read against publishers are along the lines that they take papers that were funded with public money, and thus in theory are in the public domain, yet they charge an arm and a leg for that information while at the same time preventing anyone else from distributing the free versions. So how is it that they are entitled to be payed for something they didn't create or even own for that matter? Maybe if they did actually offered an added value service, then the freebie version would be inferior and would be no need to block them from being distributed, since people would just pick their own enhanced (curated?) versions. As far as I understand it, Elsevier should only have a say on content they actually own the copyright for, which could be a lot of papers, but if I understand correctly SciHub was publishing papers that were funded with public money, is it not? or are they also hosting papers for which the copyright is actually owned by someone else?

vibrio 11y ago

With the advent of the internet, the marginal cost of producing and distributing such content has dropped by orders of magnitude since the 1990's. One would expect in a competitive, healthy economic system, some of this productivity gain would fall to customers in lower prices. This has not happened. While piracy is not the ultimate answer, it may be necessary to force the hand of the businesses and government to restructure. I don't know how/how much publishers should be compensated, but they will not give up their current rent-seeking status unless it is ripped from their cold dead hands. Information production/distribution has become a commodity, and should be priced only to support the value add of peer-review, etc. Meanwhile should authors be compensated? Yes, As an observation from the corner of science that i inhabit: authorship of 'high quality scientific books' is a 'secondary profession' with most authors having primary commitments to academic positions--which are very much enriched by authorship. I believe authors will continue to be compensated both directly and indirectly, as they are providing most of the value in the product.

morgante 11y ago

The book example is not very helpful for a few reasons. Firstly, the authors of books do get paid—writing books is not a pure tax imposed by academia. Secondly, books are not typically at the frontier of scientific knowledge (these days). They're interesting and helpful, but accessing them is not a necessity for keeping up to date. Put simply, books do not have a monopoly on knowledge. Finally, and most importantly, books are not funded by the public. Research is. If the public is paying for something, they should have access to it.

freddref 11y ago

> Should publisher's work be free? Publishers work is not needed, it can be distributed among authors who can do it at a negligible cost.

Luc 11y ago

Billions, man. They're making billions per year in profit. 'Should publisher's work be free?' is not the right question. Their service is so far from free it's indecent.

JadeNB 11y ago
> They're making billions per year in profit. 'Should publisher's work be free?' is not the right question. I don't understand the logic. We shouldn't ask if the work of people making billions should be free? That seems like exactly the sort of people of whom we should be asking it.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>Imagine the same site with pirated high quality scientific books. Imagine if publishers went and banned libraries, because only those who can afford books should be allowed to read them.

krapp 11y ago
Libraries pay for their books, which is why they have the legal right to lend them.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  A pirated book likely came from a purchased original.
  - krapp 11y ago
    Yes, a pirated book is often a illegal copy of a legal original. But every copy in a library is legally paid for - and they expect you to return the copies you borrow when you're done with them, because they would have to buy more otherwise. Libraries don't undermine copyright law, they depend on it for their survival.
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      But the damages are still done. By having a library where people can get a book for free instead of buying it, even though there is some throughput limits, they still make it so that the media is no longer consumed. Imagine a pirating service which ensures that a given file is only being consumed by one machine at a time. So if I want to watch the newest blockbuster, I have to wait my turn, and once watched, I cannot watch it again (without getting in line). In effect, the movie is checked out a single instance at a time, just like how a library checks out a single book at a time.
      - krapp 11y ago
        The real damage from piracy comes from distribution, rather than consumption. Lending might do a small amount of damage, but as long as the inventory publishers have has been paid for somehow, they don't really care. They would care if libraries started running printing presses in the back and gave away extra copies for free, which were indistinguishable from the original, which is essentially the piracy model. IANAL but I'm honestly not even certain that the piracy service you describe would actually be illegal, or at least that it couldn't be done legally.