The Rise of Pirate Libraries
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The Rise of Pirate Libraries
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Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#2Can't say I'm sympathetic to publishers. They've been rorting the system for a long time now.
When publisher substantial fund research more than government, I might start feeling differently. Of course, that will never happen as they couldn't make money.
I really would like to know - what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? And why can't Universities manage the peer review system?
Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#3Can't say I'm sympathetic to publishers. They've been rorting the system for a long time now. When publisher substantial fund research more than government, I might start feeling differently. Of course, that will never happen as they couldn't make money. I really would like to know - what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? And why can't Universities manage the peer review system?
Universities can manage the peer review system - and many do. Many journal editorial boards have zero publisher employees and are all "volunteered" by academics. The publishers in those cases are pure gatekeepers and tax collectors.
Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#4Assumption 1: the primary customers of increasingly expensive subscriptions from academic publishers are universities.
Assumption 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary customers of the universities -- students.
Assumption 3: assumptions 1 and 2 are correct.
Question: Is there any correlation to be made between the profitability of such academic publishers with the astounding rise in university tuition in the US over the past three decades?
Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#5[deleted]
Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#6Can't say I'm sympathetic to publishers. They've been rorting the system for a long time now. When publisher substantial fund research more than government, I might start feeling differently. Of course, that will never happen as they couldn't make money. I really would like to know - what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? And why can't Universities manage the peer review system?
They've been rorting the system for a long time now.
I thought at first "rorting" must be a typo, but couldn't figure what was intended. Then I looked it up and found that it was exactly as intended: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rort. Seems like a useful word, although I've never heard it here in the US.
Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#7Can't say I'm sympathetic to publishers. They've been rorting the system for a long time now. When publisher substantial fund research more than government, I might start feeling differently. Of course, that will never happen as they couldn't make money. I really would like to know - what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? And why can't Universities manage the peer review system?
> what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system?
Nothing positive, as far as I can tell. I firmly believe that they hold back the progress of the human race by limiting access to the bleeding edge of human knowledge - all for the sake of money. I'm glad people are attempting to force an overhaul of the system.
An excellent article on the matter: http://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behi...
Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#8Assumption 1: the primary customers of increasingly expensive subscriptions from academic publishers are universities. Assumption 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary customers of the universities -- students. Assumption 3: assumptions 1 and 2 are correct. Question: Is there any correlation to be made between the profitability of such academic publishers with the astounding rise in university…
Probably, but I expect it would account for less than 0.5% of the increase. The costs of everything is passed on to the students (minus the relatively constant government subsidy, if any).
Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#9Open access is being increasingly thought of as inevitable and the only ethical option for publishing academic research. What I believe we will end up with eventually is a situation where nearly all new publications are open access, and a good deal of older twentieth century (and earlier) research is publicly available as well due to ongoing digitalisation and expired copyrights. In between, there will be a significant body of research kept locked away behind paywalls by publishers trying to hold on to those cash cows and the inertia copyright on a work has once granted.
At the same time, 'piracy' on a massive scale (like Sci-Hub) will only get easier due to technological advances and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to consumers worldwide. Combine that with an utter lack of sympathy for (academic) paywalls and publishers, and a widespread believe that sharing these works is ethically just, and you have a situation that simply cannot be contained.
I expect that in twenty years time you will be able to download almost the complete library of published academic works from the twentieth and twenty first centuries in the time it takes to make a pot of coffee — legally or illegally.
So publishers will have to learn to deal with this new reality and reinvent themselves in an open access world, or perish.
Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries
#10This is a hilarious piece. You yankees are good 20 years behind the real pirate libraries trend, started with lib.ru and well continued with the genesis lib and uneraseable flibista.is. Ah, I forgot to mention nehudlit.ru, which is specialized on textbooks.