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Europe’s open-access drive escalates as university stand-offs spread
- fwn 8y ago> “Without Sci-Hub the researchers would be screaming at the libraries and state agencies not to cut them off,” he says. I think this is the money quote. The strength they show in contract negotiations is only possible since no access just pretty much means unlicensed access by now.
- Y_Y 8y agoBack before sci-hub you'd just email a colleague at an institution with the appropriate subscription. Even now I'm lazy enough to not read papers if I have to jump through hoops to get the full text.
- HarryHirsch 8y agoYes, the library had preprinted postcards that you would send to the authors, asking for a reprint. Researchers used to get 25 reprints per publication (more at nominal charge), and they would keep them in a filing cabinet. Some would collect stamps and/or show the reprint request around. (Look, another stamp from Nigeria!)
- jacquesm 8y agoIt's kind of morbidly hilarious how if this spreads to the US at some point MIT will start using a service that they spent lots of effort to stop from being engendered in the first place.
- danielecook 8y agowhat service is that?
- jacquesm 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub "For her actions in creating Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has been called a hero and "spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz"."
- HarryHirsch 8y agoYou ask why Elbakyan is politically protected but Swatrz was not. Does Russia have no publishing conglomerates?
- jacquesm 8y agoI did not ask that. She's on the run as far as I know. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/meet-the-woman-who-put-50-million-stolen-articles-online-so-you-can-read-them-for-free-a6964176.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/meet-the-w... And it is 'Swartz'.
- SXX 8y agoFirst of all she is hiding and possible not even within Russian border. So no clue where your idea of political protection is come from. And there is little point in arresting her: there are far more people working on project and nothing going to happen if public face going to disappear. What's more important it's can be tough to actually prove she actually did something illegal on her own. Of course for political activists there is no evidence required to put them in prison in Russia / Kazakhstan, but she is pro-Kremlin so it's not apply here.
- gkya 8y agoShe's one _real_ hero. You should quit this neo-cold-war complottist baseless scatter-blaming.
- namlem 8y agoShe is based in Kazakhstan, and they don't exactly have a domestic science publishing industry, no.
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- kss238 8y agoWhat exactly do these publishers do that causes them to charge so much? Aren't they just hosting some pdfs and keeping editors on staff to look over the papers?
- Y_Y 8y agoNot really, in the sense that the reviews and editors are usually volunteers. Their main function seems to be negotiating and coordinating emails. Even for journals my university subscribes to, I'll often just get the paper from arXiv since it's easier.
- overeater 8y agoWhile I agree that the publishers are asking for too much, what they provide is the infrastructure and procedures for publishing. I think we'd both agree startups like Yelp and AirBnB provide some non-zero value, yet I can also ask, "What exactly do AirBnB and Yelp do that causes them to have a billion dollar valuation? Aren't they just hosting some images/reviews and keeping editors on staff to look over the posts?"
- toxik 8y agoI feel like this is an unfair analogy. AirBnb and Yelp charge reasonable prices and take a mostly reasonable cut, if any at all. The publishing houses are charging enormous amounts, far beyond the value they add. Or so the argument goes.
- overeater 8y agoSure, I think we both agree that the price is not proportional to the service as I already stated. The grantparent post (and other posts here) was asking in a way that implied they weren't doing more than hosting pdfs. I was just pointing out that many of our lauded startups basically are just nothing more than network effect and content hosting as well. And in fact, if they could get away with charging Elsevier-like prices, they would immediately do so and be celebrated for it.
- dwheeler 8y agoThere is a relatively simple alternative. Just declare that if the government pays for most of the research, resulting articles cannot be copyrighted. It is already the case in the United States that most works by US government employees cannot be copyrighted. Once there is no copyright, there is no way to prevent distribution. If people paid to do the research, they should be able to get the results. There really is no excuse anymore for the old publishing System. It was important at one time, but its time has passed.
- HarryHirsch 8y agoAnything NIH/NSF-funded is available through open access since 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy The real problem is that young tenure-track faculty need publications for tenure. This wasn't always the case at teaching colleges, until perhaps 15 years ago at a so-so 4-year college you were perfectly fine with the papers from your PhD. Nowadays it's different, there's a need for publications and gutter journals. At the high end you need papers in high-profile journals and publishers will oblige on that front, too.
- tgb 8y agoMy understanding was that this was NIH only and not NSF (though the NIH has a much larger budget so it's the majority of such funding).
- garmaine 8y agoMost of the work done by the US government is not done by civil servants but by contractors, and the contractors hold the copyright. That tidbit of copyright law is not as useful as you might expect.
- markdown 8y agoI though that nonsense was only something that photographers did. I do contract web dev work for clients all the time. Should I be retaining all copyright?
- jessaustin 8y agoSpringer Nature, TFA's publisher, aren't really a disinterested party in this discussion.
- Quanttek 8y agoArticle didn't seem biased to me though
- jopsen 8y agoFailing to justify the existence of publishers seems like a bias to me. Why don't universities forbid hosting of conferences that aren't open access. Then years later forbid participation in such conferences. We can pay publishers for another 10-20 years to access what they have. But we should stop giving them content. Publishing is practically free.
- Jerry2 8y ago>Sci-Hub, a website that illicitly hosts full copies of papers and is used by academics around the world, is also a big factor, says Joseph Esposito, a publishing consultant in New York City. “Without Sci-Hub the researchers would be screaming at the libraries and state agencies not to cut them off,” he says. Well, if you're going to bet your future on Sci-Hub, at least donate to the project and start creating local laws that would allow local versions of Sci-Hub archives.
- garmaine 8y agoThe sci-hub people have unfortunately been unwilling to allow backups of their data.
- labster 8y agoJust about 15 slots down on the front page there's a page about sci-hub torrents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115176
- mapt 8y agoThere are abundant mentions of torrents, and little to no mention of successful third-party mirroring efforts. The files are useless without metadata and a database-driven site to use them with - is that stuff now included?
- Jerry2 8y ago>and little to no mention of successful third-party mirroring efforts That's probably because space requirements are huge (tens of terabytes of storage) and it's probably not legal in most jurisdictions (probably none of them). Those two would probably stop most people who are thinking about this. But let's say you managed to download and host it all and don't give a damn about law (maybe a Tor node?), you'd still have to grapple with bandwidth requirements for hosting such a huge collection of documents (including anti-DDoS provisions). Finally, I don't think the database itself is offered by anyone so you'd have to scrape the DOI data and create the front-end for the website. So unless you're rich and are willing to throw lots of money at this, I don't think anyone is willing to do it for no financial benefit whatsoever (and a massive downside if you get caught by the long arm of the US DOJ/FBI).
- quotemstr 8y agoAm I the only person left who still worries about the incentive alignment problem inherent in the pay-to-publish model? To a first approximation, everyone wants to make more money. Journals under an open access model make more money when they publish more articles, and the fastest way to publish more articles is to lower standards and accept more articles for publication. Researchers also have a strong incentive to publish as much as possible in order to boost their citation counts, which serve as a proxy for prestige these days and which factor heavily into tenure decisions. Since grants and institutions[1] pay for open access publication fees, researchers have an incentive to select "predatory" journals with low standards and high fees. We already see this dynamic developing. In short, all the incentives line up to encourage the publication of a large volume of low-quality research. Science already has a severe problem with junk research, especially in the social sciences where a large fraction of results simply do not reproduce. Do we want to make this problem even worse? I'm sure the specific people involved in the system have the best intentions, but as a matter of history and of human nature, good intentions are powerless in the face of incentives. The most dangerous four-word phrase in human history is "This time, it's different". [1] Google, for example, will pay open-access publication fees.
- garmaine 8y agoWhy are you assuming the alternative is pay to publish?
- zerostar07 8y agobecause thats what how open access mostly works today
- quotemstr 8y agoHow else do you fund curation? Research without some kind of quality filtering mechanism is just a bunch of blog posts.
- garmaine 8y agoNon-profit member-run organizations come to mind. “Pay” for publication with credits earned doing volunteer review work, or something like that. Or even just a pay to publish with a non profit mandate and board elected by the published researchers would eliminate much of the complained about incentive problem. The problem here is having a for profit publisher, not the way in which that publisher makes its revenue.
- dang 8y agoDiscussed a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17097561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17097561.
- sytelus 8y agoDoes anyone know what's the deal with IEEE? Lots of papers I encounter behind paywall are in IEEE Xplorer. I thought IEEE is non-profit institute (for engineers, by engineers). Why do they participate in this? What can we as IEEE members do to change this?