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The Rise of Pirate Libraries

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Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#21

Post by msellout »

return0 wrote: post #16
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 su…

Not all science is statistics. That's just the current paradigm and not applicable in all cases. I agree the reward system is flawed, but it ain't so easy to improve it.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#22

Post by morgante »

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…

> 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.

I hope and suspect it won't take twenty years. Academic journals are an anachronism and moreover an unethical anachronism.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#23

Post by privong »

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 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary customers of the universities -- students.

This is not likely to be true. Most universities in the US take overheads on grants. So if you get a $20,000 grant, the university will often take up to $12,000 of that (usually it's in the $6000–8000 range), and the researcher uses the rest. That money in overheads is used for a variety of things, including supporting the research (i.e., paying for journal subscriptions).

> 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?

Journals are expensive, but they're not _that_ expensive. It's much more plausible that the rise in tuition can be linked to non-academic expenditures at universities, including athletic facilities (e.g., gyms for students), fancy dining halls and dorms, and non-academic staff. Maybe one could argue those aren't the drivers of high tuition, but I'd be surprised if a rise in journal costs were remotely comparable.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#25

Post by userbinator »

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…

will only get easier due to technological advances and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to consumers worldwide.

Not if some of those "technological advances" are acting against this movement:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#26

Post by eggy »

ommunist wrote: post #10

This 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.

Good references. On the side, seeing as most of what is the internet started here (packet switching and ARPANET), and there were hacker BBSs and pirated material before Pirate Bay, I'd say we were not behind in any of these trends. And go further back to the invention of the transistor in NJ, USA, mate ;)

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#27

Post by nullc »

privong wrote: post #23
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 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary customers of the universities -- students. This is not likely to be true. Most universities in the US take overheads on grants. So if you get a $20,000 grant, the university will often take up to $12,000 of that (usually it's in the $6000–8000 range), and the researcher uses the rest. That money in overheads is used for a variety of things, inc…

> Journals are expensive, but they're not _that_ expensive.

https://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/

Would $25,888/yr for a single journal not count as '_that_ expensive'?

But I agree they're not likely a tuition driver. After all, institutions can simply drop subscriptions: they don't do much for attracting students compared to facilities.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#28

Post by WildUtah »

morgante wrote: post #22
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…

> 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. I hope and suspect it won't take twenty years. Academic journals are an anachronism and moreover an unethical anachronism.

Closed access academic journals were an unethical anachronism twenty years ago. And yet we've made little progress against them.

Re: The Rise of Pirate Libraries

#29

Post by AlbertoGP »

ommunist wrote: post #10

This 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.

Thanks for the links! I didn't know all of them.

I suppose that by flibista.is you actually mean http://flibusta.is/

Cheers!

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