4 ms·

Surprised by the cynicism here. I'm a scientist, and I'm a fan of what she's done. I think most of us probably are, actually.

cbkeller 8y ago
For a bit more context, my favorite article on the topic: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... tl;dr: Scientific publishing wasn't always like this. Publication was run mostly by scientific societies, who would charge little more than the physical cost of printing, but were inefficient and had huge backlogs. The shift to the current status quo was pioneered by a literal conman, Robert Maxwell, who saw an opportunity to build a "perpetual financing machine". Maxwell eventually moved on to massive pension fraud instead [1], but in the meanwhile succeeded in building up Pergamon Press (the Elsevier-before-Elsevier) into a juggernaut with 47% profit margins. A few particularly relevant quotes: > As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars. > Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted. > Scientific conferences tended to be drab, low-ceilinged affairs, but when Maxwell returned to the Geneva conference that year, he rented a house in nearby Collonge-Bellerive, a picturesque town on the lakeshore, where he entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him. “He always said we don’t compete on sales, we compete on authors,” Albert Henderson, a former deputy director at Pergamon, told me. “We would attend conferences specifically looking to recruit editors for new journals.” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Aftermath:_Theft_of_pension_funds,_collapse_of_a_publishing_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Aftermath:_Thef...
jancsika 8y ago
That's great to hear. How much of a fan are you and the others to whom you refer? Have you/they praised her/sci-hub in publicly accessible articles/videos?
- cbkeller 8y ago
  This is public and traceable to my real identity right now. I've always had legal access to the content I need personally, so I've never had to actually use sci-hub -- but I appreciate that it's a huge equalizer for those less fortunate. It's generally considered a bad idea to publicly admit to copyright infringement, or else you might see sci-hub in paper acknowlegments [1]. In the first relevant survey I could find, however [2] > 62.5% of participants affirmed that Sci-Hub contributes to scientific investigation; only 2.2% reported that Sci-Hub does not contribute to science. More broadly, the open access movement has been around for years, and has made huge progress IMO considering that academia doesn't turn on a dime. I should probably also point out that if sci-hub is napster, we've had a sneakernet for literally centuries. If you see a paper you like, just email one of the authors and they're very likely to send it to you. Prior to email, the same thing was done through regular mail -- to the point that many departments probably have a stack of "reprint request" postcards somewhere in the basement. They look like this [3]. See also the #ICanHazPDF hashtag for the social media version. [1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115621/is-it-wise-for-researchers-to-thank-alexandra-elbakyan-founder-of-sci-hub-in-t https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115621/is-it-wi... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185673 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [3] http://blog.chembark.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/reprintcards_big.jpg http://blog.chembark.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/reprintc...

cbkeller 8y ago

For a bit more context, my favorite article on the topic: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... tl;dr: Scientific publishing wasn't always like this. Publication was run mostly by scientific societies, who would charge little more than the physical cost of printing, but were inefficient and had huge backlogs. The shift to the current status quo was pioneered by a literal conman, Robert Maxwell, who saw an opportunity to build a "perpetual financing machine". Maxwell eventually moved on to massive pension fraud instead [1], but in the meanwhile succeeded in building up Pergamon Press (the Elsevier-before-Elsevier) into a juggernaut with 47% profit margins. A few particularly relevant quotes: > As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars. > Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted. > Scientific conferences tended to be drab, low-ceilinged affairs, but when Maxwell returned to the Geneva conference that year, he rented a house in nearby Collonge-Bellerive, a picturesque town on the lakeshore, where he entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him. “He always said we don’t compete on sales, we compete on authors,” Albert Henderson, a former deputy director at Pergamon, told me. “We would attend conferences specifically looking to recruit editors for new journals.” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Aftermath:_Theft_of_pension_funds,_collapse_of_a_publishing_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Aftermath:_Thef...

jancsika 8y ago

That's great to hear. How much of a fan are you and the others to whom you refer? Have you/they praised her/sci-hub in publicly accessible articles/videos?

cbkeller 8y ago
This is public and traceable to my real identity right now. I've always had legal access to the content I need personally, so I've never had to actually use sci-hub -- but I appreciate that it's a huge equalizer for those less fortunate. It's generally considered a bad idea to publicly admit to copyright infringement, or else you might see sci-hub in paper acknowlegments [1]. In the first relevant survey I could find, however [2] > 62.5% of participants affirmed that Sci-Hub contributes to scientific investigation; only 2.2% reported that Sci-Hub does not contribute to science. More broadly, the open access movement has been around for years, and has made huge progress IMO considering that academia doesn't turn on a dime. I should probably also point out that if sci-hub is napster, we've had a sneakernet for literally centuries. If you see a paper you like, just email one of the authors and they're very likely to send it to you. Prior to email, the same thing was done through regular mail -- to the point that many departments probably have a stack of "reprint request" postcards somewhere in the basement. They look like this [3]. See also the #ICanHazPDF hashtag for the social media version. [1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115621/is-it-wise-for-researchers-to-thank-alexandra-elbakyan-founder-of-sci-hub-in-t https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115621/is-it-wi... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185673 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [3] http://blog.chembark.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/reprintcards_big.jpg http://blog.chembark.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/reprintc...