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The Rise of Pirate Libraries

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Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#11

Post by Freak_NL »

wsfull wrote: post #4

Assumption 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…

Assumption two seems dubious, because universities in the rest of the world pay for the same subscriptions, but don't pass these costs on to their students. It may be true for the US though.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#12

Post by ommunist »

wsfull wrote: post #4

Assumption 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…

WHo cares about the US? The collective knowledge of humanity is at stake. The keepers are restless, believe me. And most of them do not even speak English.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#13

Post by shkkmo »

wsfull wrote: post #4

Assumption 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…

Presumably some, but from what I read, much of the increase in tuition it tied to increases in administration costs.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#14

Post by neonscribe »

nkurz wrote: post #6
chris_wot wrote: post #2

Can'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.

In this context, is "rorting" synonymous with "unfairly exploiting"?

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#15

Post by chris_wot »

neonscribe wrote: post #14
nkurz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this context, is "rorting" synonymous with "unfairly exploiting"?

Pretty much. It's a term used a lot in Australia.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#16

Post by return0 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #9

Open 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 significa…

Journal publishing itself is awkward. It's bad use of experimental data - often you have to look at printed graphs to figure out data values not reported in the paper. Statistic power is almost never mentioned. Tons of data that could be useful to other researchers is discarded. Discussion sections tend to be overly biased. There is so much research output, it's almost impossible to refute anything and possibel to support almost anything. And so on and so on. What we need is accurate databases of research results, not more publishing.

We should be rewarding scientists for the volume, integrity and significance of their data output, not for what they claim themselves in their papers.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#17

Post by csydas »

wsfull wrote: post #4

Assumption 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…

As much as it is a broken system, in this case likely no. The actual subscriptions are cost prohibitive pretty much just to individuals and to organizations outside western Academia. The distinction of "western" is only relevant in that from what I recall working with Librarians at my last University job, the publishers do business differently with the US and parts of EU than they do elsewhere in the world.

Rising tuition costs are an issue, but in relation to an academic budget, journal subscriptions will still account for a very small percent of the overall budget, even for relatively small University.

The Publisher/University subscription loop, however, is indeed real and has been covered here before I believe. The short of it is that quite a few publishers are basically held together by taxpayer money in the form of continued library subscriptions. The need for a middleman in these cases is pretty questionable, as the publishers basically just host the content at this point and do no curation or peer review themselves.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#18

Post by jccalhoun »

wsfull wrote: post #4

Assumption 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…

While the cost for access to databases is quite high, it probably only a few dollars per student at most.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#20

Post by shubb »

jccalhoun wrote: post #18
wsfull wrote: post #4

Assumption 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…

While the cost for access to databases is quite high, it probably only a few dollars per student at most.

Which is interesting in itself, because it means that they could offer affordable personal subscriptions without losing money.

So in fact huge journal subscription fees becomes a way to trap academic research in these institutions, rather than just journal greediness.

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