121–130 of 398 posts
While pirating music or movies, one may try justify ones actions, but deep down it feels wrong. This doesn't even feel wrong. These parasites had it coming.
We should strive for a logical explanation that transcends emotional response.
Researchers have been (illegally) helping each other out with paper access for years. I used to hang out in the neuroscience group on livejournal years ago, and about half the posts were people asking "Does anyone have access to Foo et al 2012?" and then having it passed along to them by email.
I'm sad Aaron Swartz did not live to see this unfolding. He might have been in prison now, but he would still be a world-class hero.
It is in the interest of the general public to mirror these services as many time as we should. Paywalls for scientific articles are holding back the whole species. Fusion reactor when? Maybe when the patents for technological advance will not be held by oil companies around the world, whose short term interests cap the our technological progress to make the world a more livable place. I have a couple PhD student fri…
While pirating music or movies, one may try justify ones actions, but deep down it feels wrong. This doesn't even feel wrong. These parasites had it coming.
It does feel wrong, but it feels equally wrong that the government orders the police to prevent citizen from copying bytes .
The fact that the distribution cost is close to zero is irrelevant.
The problem with copyright is that a big proportion of the price charged is basically cartel/gatekeeper protection money, and has no useful relationship to the true social cost/value of creative work.
Developing voting, flagging, moderating mechanisms, that's what many developers have done for years now on the web. Obviously you wouldn't rate papers like reddit comments but plug arxiv/sci-hub to a system allowing researchers to say what papers they reviewed, what their degree of approval is, eventually where it's been published, who references this paper etc. Seems like Arxiv has an endorsement system but as they say "The endorsement process is not peer review", just a way to reduce spam. Isn't there anything done on this subject ?
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I based my comment on memory. As I recall, reprints cost on the order of $0.50 each in the early 80s. Based on http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ that's about $1.20 in present dollars. That's a lot less than $30.
Bloody hell. So we are looking at a 2,000% increasing since the 80s?
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That reminds me of the whole talk around "open standards" that you have to pay for to legally acquire (ANSI, ISO, IEEE, etc.), although in that case the situation is slightly different. Also, the "free software" vs "open source" distinction.
Oh this is a huge pet peeve of mine, it's unbelievable. Granted, a lot of work goes into these standards, and they don't come out of nowere, still
It gets even worse. I am working on software that confirms to guidelines set by the Dutch government for handling healthcare data. These Dutch national standards were actually (and justly!) made free instead of available at a fee because they became requirements instead of just guidelines. But these standards are (naturally) based on international standards. This is fine for the RFC's that are freely available, but for the three (!) relevant Dutch standards (NEN 7510, 7512, 7513) you would need access to another forty-ish (!!) ISO standards that may, or may not, be relevant to the section you are dealing with.
Of course even a single PDF for these healthcare ISO standards costs up to €100, to be paid in Swiss Francs…
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Can you cross-publish / self-publish as well?
It depends on the venue. In my field of computer science (visual analytics / visualizations) at least some of the leading journals/conferences officially allow you to put a version of the paper on your website. Just today we submitted a paper where the copyright form explicitly mentions that.