6 ms·

Aaron cofounded Reddit, resigned, turned down multiple opportinities to build out other tech companies, dedicated himself to open access activism and eventually

Aaron cofounded Reddit, resigned, turned down multiple opportinities to build out other tech companies, dedicated himself to open access activism and eventually killed himself as he was prosecuted for wire fraud. Meanwhile, Relx currently has a market cap of £33 bn, and revenue of £8 bn, when it is essentially providing the service of pdf publishing to its unpaid authors and editors. Arron and Alexandra are extremely brave, and it is Relx and other companies that are taking my property when my tax money is spent to generate research that they then want to charge millions of dollars for others to access.

refurb 6y ago
My point still stands. Very easy to argue for taking other people’s property.
- logicchains 6y ago
  It's not "taking property" if somebody still has the "property" afterwards.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Not a convincing argument. We wouldn’t have artists if their work could just be copied whenever.
    - shenberg 6y ago
      That's exactly the difference: the scientists don't get paid from the money you pay the journal. They do the work for free and the reviewers do the work for free. If all the journals somehow disappeared, nothing much would change. In some fields the pre-print is what counts anyways, and you don't pay to download a paper on arXiv.
      - refurb 6y ago
        Your comment makes no sense. No one is forced to publish in these journals. It's a choice. So if these journal did disappear I highly doubt "nothing would change".
        rsfern 6y ago
        The choice of publication venue is driven by prestige. Researchers want to publish in “high impact,” high visibility venues. In many fields those are closed journals, but if those journals magically disappeared the research community would probably just take a bit to figure out a new pecking order, and in that sense nothing would change. JMLR is an interesting example, where the editorial board of a top journal in the machine learning field basically forked the journal to an open alternative, and of course nobody hesitated to publish there because that’s where the prestige was. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_...
        oli5679 6y ago
        For new fields like machine learning, there are free, open access journals that work perfectly well in filtering the highest quality research. It is helpful to have top tier journals like Nature, but the value is generated by the editors and article submittors. If we shut down the top journals tomorrow new open access ones would quickly take their place, and the behaviour of their owners is parasitic.
    - Terretta 6y ago
      Citation needed. The notion that we have no art or artists unless compensated appears to imply money somehow causes art. If this were the case, then why all the fuss when capitalist music and art industry “discover” an artist? Sure, some pop groups are created, but the greats are discovered, long existing, before glommed onto by publishers or labels. The argument that artist was not already creating art, uncompensated, for the sake of creation and, particularly for music, sharing, seems without basis in clear objective reality of where art comes from or what ‘causes’ artists to create art. Perhaps you’re confusing distribution with art. The distribution industry would look very different if sharing were frictionless from artist to fan to fan and no middleman had to get a vig.

refurb 6y ago

My point still stands. Very easy to argue for taking other people’s property.

logicchains 6y ago
It's not "taking property" if somebody still has the "property" afterwards.
- refurb 6y ago
  Not a convincing argument. We wouldn’t have artists if their work could just be copied whenever.
  - shenberg 6y ago
    That's exactly the difference: the scientists don't get paid from the money you pay the journal. They do the work for free and the reviewers do the work for free. If all the journals somehow disappeared, nothing much would change. In some fields the pre-print is what counts anyways, and you don't pay to download a paper on arXiv.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Your comment makes no sense. No one is forced to publish in these journals. It's a choice. So if these journal did disappear I highly doubt "nothing would change".
      - rsfern 6y ago
        The choice of publication venue is driven by prestige. Researchers want to publish in “high impact,” high visibility venues. In many fields those are closed journals, but if those journals magically disappeared the research community would probably just take a bit to figure out a new pecking order, and in that sense nothing would change. JMLR is an interesting example, where the editorial board of a top journal in the machine learning field basically forked the journal to an open alternative, and of course nobody hesitated to publish there because that’s where the prestige was. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_...
      - oli5679 6y ago
        For new fields like machine learning, there are free, open access journals that work perfectly well in filtering the highest quality research. It is helpful to have top tier journals like Nature, but the value is generated by the editors and article submittors. If we shut down the top journals tomorrow new open access ones would quickly take their place, and the behaviour of their owners is parasitic.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    Citation needed. The notion that we have no art or artists unless compensated appears to imply money somehow causes art. If this were the case, then why all the fuss when capitalist music and art industry “discover” an artist? Sure, some pop groups are created, but the greats are discovered, long existing, before glommed onto by publishers or labels. The argument that artist was not already creating art, uncompensated, for the sake of creation and, particularly for music, sharing, seems without basis in clear objective reality of where art comes from or what ‘causes’ artists to create art. Perhaps you’re confusing distribution with art. The distribution industry would look very different if sharing were frictionless from artist to fan to fan and no middleman had to get a vig.