4 ms·

The only thing I still don't get: if there is a contract for unlimited access, why aren't unis setting up mirrors locally?

by pmlnr 9y ago

jk563 9y ago
Because they have unlimited access?
- pmlnr 9y ago
  There are mirrors for many things, like linux distributions & packages, for which universities, historically, set up mirrors, to make things faster and distributed. It also makes sense not to leave the university network in my eyes. Apparently they don't have unlimited access in reality (see the top comment), so if someone was doing this to me - "unlimited", yeah, not really - I'd set up a mirror and slowly copy the whole thing over to avoid not being able to access the documents in case I get banned and sorting it out takes time. I'm well aware this might be a legal problem, but blocking valid access is also a legal problem.
dpwm 9y ago
Not sure about countries with more sensible policy but in the UK, as an academic, you have to publish regularly to not have your research grant applications declined. This means that there are a lot of papers out there that are published for publishing's sake. It's a game you have to play for your career as a postdoc. Depending on the field, it can be hard to tell whether a paper was written for publishing's sake or to actually present a useful result from the abstract alone. Because of effectively mandatory publishing, mirroring is quite a big effort and, from a publisher's point of view, relatively easy to spot. It is probably these countermeasures which we are talking about here wrt LSU. With research being ever more focussed and specialised, there are fields where there may only be a couple of papers and you may be the only person in your department that is interested in that particular paper in that particular year. Now, you could cache papers as they are downloaded, but there are definitely ways of making papers cache unfriendly and the journals have probably already done this, given they really don't have a lot else to do. As others have mentioned, it is probably also a breach of contract to cache or mirror the papers.
upvotinglurker 9y ago
Most likely the contract with Elsevier prohibits this. In the fine print, "unlimited access" is probably defined as something like "what we, the publisher, consider normal/reasonable reading speeds by a human using our site/server." At my academic library, for example, it's common, and apparently contractually sanctioned, for a publisher to temporarily IP-block a computer that they deem to be engaging in "excessive" or software-mediated downloading.

The only thing I still don't get: if there is a contract for unlimited access, why aren't unis setting up mirrors locally?

by pmlnr 9y ago

The only thing I still don't get: if there is a contract for unlimited access, why aren't unis setting up mirrors locally?

jk563 9y ago

Because they have unlimited access?

pmlnr 9y ago
There are mirrors for many things, like linux distributions & packages, for which universities, historically, set up mirrors, to make things faster and distributed. It also makes sense not to leave the university network in my eyes. Apparently they don't have unlimited access in reality (see the top comment), so if someone was doing this to me - "unlimited", yeah, not really - I'd set up a mirror and slowly copy the whole thing over to avoid not being able to access the documents in case I get banned and sorting it out takes time. I'm well aware this might be a legal problem, but blocking valid access is also a legal problem.

dpwm 9y ago

Not sure about countries with more sensible policy but in the UK, as an academic, you have to publish regularly to not have your research grant applications declined. This means that there are a lot of papers out there that are published for publishing's sake. It's a game you have to play for your career as a postdoc. Depending on the field, it can be hard to tell whether a paper was written for publishing's sake or to actually present a useful result from the abstract alone. Because of effectively mandatory publishing, mirroring is quite a big effort and, from a publisher's point of view, relatively easy to spot. It is probably these countermeasures which we are talking about here wrt LSU. With research being ever more focussed and specialised, there are fields where there may only be a couple of papers and you may be the only person in your department that is interested in that particular paper in that particular year. Now, you could cache papers as they are downloaded, but there are definitely ways of making papers cache unfriendly and the journals have probably already done this, given they really don't have a lot else to do. As others have mentioned, it is probably also a breach of contract to cache or mirror the papers.

upvotinglurker 9y ago

Most likely the contract with Elsevier prohibits this. In the fine print, "unlimited access" is probably defined as something like "what we, the publisher, consider normal/reasonable reading speeds by a human using our site/server." At my academic library, for example, it's common, and apparently contractually sanctioned, for a publisher to temporarily IP-block a computer that they deem to be engaging in "excessive" or software-mediated downloading.