4 ms·

I'm genuinely curious who you think would give you flak. Publishers? Your department faculty? The librarian at your university? Your peers? (reason I'm interes

I'm genuinely curious who you think would give you flak. Publishers? Your department faculty? The librarian at your university? Your peers? (reason I'm interested: I'm on the board of Sage and have a board meeting tomorrow where I hope we'll be discussing sci-hub)

chias 10y ago
I'm mostly concerned about what my department would do under pressure from publishers and/or the government. Being part of a state university, publicly endorsing illegal actions is unwise on my part. Especially if they undermine the establishment that the school serves.
- dougmccune 10y ago
  Thanks for the insight. I'm curious to follow it through and try to understand what you think practical repercussions would be. So say you have your CV up online with sci-hub links, and a publisher does somehow complain to the university. Wouldn't the worst that happens be you change it and say sorry? Or do you think there would be more serious consequences? Is being seen as "pro piracy" a black mark that would stay with you somehow?
  - chias 10y ago
    I don't think there would be any real repercussions. But this close to the end, it seems foolish to bet the last six years of my life on a mildly amusing act of civil disobedience. While I have complete faith in my department not being staffed with idiots and zealots, I have no similar faith in our government. Being a state school, that's ultimately who we answer to. The whole Aaron Schwartz debacle evaporated any faith I might have had in our government's ability to deal with this sort of thing like grownups.
nxzero 10y ago
SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work. Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?
- dougmccune 10y ago
  There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad issue. Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture. So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher). The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.
  - nxzero 10y ago
    Understand, thank you for everything you're doing - keep up the good work.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    > In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research. There is no cost of publishing your/my papers as open access. Just follow these easy steps: 1. Write paper, send to journal 2. Do the peer review hokey pokey until paper is accepted 3. Upload preprint version to preprint server (arXiv etc.), with link to journal version If you're brave, you can do step 3 before step 2. This whole concept of paying for open access is ridiculous and should go die in a fire.

chias 10y ago

I'm mostly concerned about what my department would do under pressure from publishers and/or the government. Being part of a state university, publicly endorsing illegal actions is unwise on my part. Especially if they undermine the establishment that the school serves.

dougmccune 10y ago
Thanks for the insight. I'm curious to follow it through and try to understand what you think practical repercussions would be. So say you have your CV up online with sci-hub links, and a publisher does somehow complain to the university. Wouldn't the worst that happens be you change it and say sorry? Or do you think there would be more serious consequences? Is being seen as "pro piracy" a black mark that would stay with you somehow?
- chias 10y ago
  I don't think there would be any real repercussions. But this close to the end, it seems foolish to bet the last six years of my life on a mildly amusing act of civil disobedience. While I have complete faith in my department not being staffed with idiots and zealots, I have no similar faith in our government. Being a state school, that's ultimately who we answer to. The whole Aaron Schwartz debacle evaporated any faith I might have had in our government's ability to deal with this sort of thing like grownups.

nxzero 10y ago

SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work. Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?

dougmccune 10y ago
There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad issue. Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture. So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher). The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.
- nxzero 10y ago
  Understand, thank you for everything you're doing - keep up the good work.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  > In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research. There is no cost of publishing your/my papers as open access. Just follow these easy steps: 1. Write paper, send to journal 2. Do the peer review hokey pokey until paper is accepted 3. Upload preprint version to preprint server (arXiv etc.), with link to journal version If you're brave, you can do step 3 before step 2. This whole concept of paying for open access is ridiculous and should go die in a fire.