Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
bjoern.brembs.net
Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
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Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#2So long as we're looking at intellectual property, and arguments against it:
An online book by UCLA economics professors Michele Boldrin and Mark Levine, making the case against intellectual property -- patents, and copyright most especially.
The opening chapter leads off with the patent battles of James Watt, which are credited by some authors with setting back the start date of the Industrial Revolution from 1769, when the patent was issued, to 1800, when it (after parliamentary extension) finally expired.
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstne...
Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#3elbakyan surely belongs to the category of contemporary outlaw-/folk-heroes. at least she is in my personal pantheon.
Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#4This means it is our duty to the citizens to reduce our publishing expenses to no more than currently ~US$200m per year (and we would even increase the value of the literature by making it open to boot!). If we were to do that, we’d have US$9.8b every single year to buy all the different infrastructure solutions that already exist to support all our intellectual outputs, be that text, data or code.
Is is also our duty as the people to reduce all expenditures on software? Is piracy justifiable especially within government institutions?
I guess my point is that necessary is a really strong claim and you can justify a lot of crazy stuff with that. Scientific progress has continued on just fine despite these cartels. With no supporting evidence I'd argue that today's scholars have hundreds of times the free information available than they did a century ago and that ramps up the further you go back. It's easy to imagine that Elsevier's lockdown of a paper is the difference between an academic breakthrough or not, but in reality that's probably not the case, even if it's a noble cause.
Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#5In my experience as a mathematician, most for profit journal publishing companies are essentially rentiers making money off a captive clientele, who don't even get much utility any more from them, except for access to some older articles. Moreover, the services they provide to authors are also usually worse than the non-profit journals: no copy editing, crappy editorial tools, just a complete disregard for the actual producers of the (free) content they make money off. It's a complete and unmitigated scam.
Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#6This means it is our duty to the citizens to reduce our publishing expenses to no more than currently ~US$200m per year (and we would even increase the value of the literature by making it open to boot!). If we were to do that, we’d have US$9.8b every single year to buy all the different infrastructure solutions that already exist to support all our intellectual outputs, be that text, data or code. Is is also our dut…
I don't believe the publishing model is significantly impeding progress in science , but that doesn't change the fact that the publishing companies are simply leeches, profiting off the work and labor of others. It's worth breaking that up, because there's no actual value there.
Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#7This means it is our duty to the citizens to reduce our publishing expenses to no more than currently ~US$200m per year (and we would even increase the value of the literature by making it open to boot!). If we were to do that, we’d have US$9.8b every single year to buy all the different infrastructure solutions that already exist to support all our intellectual outputs, be that text, data or code. Is is also our dut…
If Elsevier and others want to keep their monopolies they need to justify the following:
How it is possible that they take: - free labor (reviews done by scientists) - free content (articles created by government money mostly)
Then they magically become owners of that content and are permitted by society to charge obscene amount of money.
Also fuck you and your ignorance, that is why we cannot have nice things.
Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#8In my experience as a mathematician, most for profit journal publishing companies are essentially rentiers making money off a captive clientele, who don't even get much utility any more from them, except for access to some older articles. Moreover, the services they provide to authors are also usually worse than the non-profit journals: no copy editing, crappy editorial tools, just a complete disregard for the actual…
It's critical to realise that the main role journals play among active, tenure-track academics is in restricting upward professional growth.
If you must publish in high-impact journals, and those journals are closed-access, then you must publish in closed-access journals.
Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. The rentiership is actually on the professional advancement track.
Corollary: it is only necessary for journals to retain the tenure committees on their side in order to keep their money-printing operation running.
Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#9This means it is our duty to the citizens to reduce our publishing expenses to no more than currently ~US$200m per year (and we would even increase the value of the literature by making it open to boot!). If we were to do that, we’d have US$9.8b every single year to buy all the different infrastructure solutions that already exist to support all our intellectual outputs, be that text, data or code. Is is also our dut…
I don't believe the publishing model is significantly impeding progress in science , but that doesn't change the fact that the publishing companies are simply leeches, profiting off the work and labor of others. It's worth breaking that up, because there's no actual value there.
It is.
Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
#10In my experience as a mathematician, most for profit journal publishing companies are essentially rentiers making money off a captive clientele, who don't even get much utility any more from them, except for access to some older articles. Moreover, the services they provide to authors are also usually worse than the non-profit journals: no copy editing, crappy editorial tools, just a complete disregard for the actual…
It's critical to realise that the main role journals play among active, tenure-track academics is in restricting upward professional growth . If you must publish in high-impact journals, and those journals are closed-access, then you must publish in closed-access journals. Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not cha…
Tenure-track academia is an exercise in restricting upward professional growth, anyway. It's built into the system.
When you've chosen the tenure track, you know you might be spending a decade at a school nobody has ever heard of pumping out research nobody is ever gonna read. There are some stars undoubtedly but there are only so many tenure track jobs. Academics have embraced that system for a long time, the journals are just a side-effect of that acceptance.