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Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

bjoern.brembs.net

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Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#21

Post by crispinb »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #6
aaron-lebo wrote: post #4

This 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.

As a layperson who hasn't looked into this in detail, I can't tell whether or not the academic publishing racket has impeded sciences. But I do know it impedes public access to the findings of research that is frequently supported in whole or part with public money.

That public access to its own research is a good is clearly recognised (at least here in Australia) by universities, most of whose libraries are open to the public (as are the databases via in-library PCs, but not remotely). But you must be near one for this to be practically useful.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#22

Post by crispinb »

llukas wrote: post #7
aaron-lebo wrote: post #4

This 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.

Was the last bit of incivility really necessary?

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#23

Post by iak8god »

heliophobicdude wrote: post #17
apathy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I send her $5 a month and it's 1000x more valuable than HBO go or any of that sort of shit. She is quite simply a hero, full stop.

If you don't minD telling us, how do we send her money to support her?

http://sci-hub.cc/ lists a bitcoin address for donations

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#24

Post by crispinb »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #12
dredmorbius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: where do you place control of that gate, and what consequences derive from that. Counterpoint: if closed-access journals are no longer the constraint, how does that change the overall academic landscape? For better or worse? Information filters will remain, and they will remain imperfect.

My perhaps biased belief is they aren't any real constraint. Closed journals do have more power than they should, but they are also an effective signaling mechanism: if something is in X you know it's worth paying attention to over the hundreds of thousands of other papers that will get pushed out every year. My personal academic experience has been that as the lowliest student at a uni you get access to everything a…

I don't know what country you're in, but here in Australia I have known people have to travel hundreds of kilometres to get access to the latest research. If a wide range of papers are needed this can be cheaper than paying per-article, but is still an extremely expensive method of access to research which (a) we are forced through taxation to partly pay for, and (b) is surprisingly often required (eg. environmental & medical data for legal purposes, making political representations, etc).

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#25

Post by erikpukinskis »

dredmorbius wrote: post #8
tacomonstrous wrote: post #5

In 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…

> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change.

Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate.

This only works if a truly top tier candidate who can continue to work without limitation in a Post-docs position. I.e. someone with the research equivalent of "fuck-you money". But it doesn't have to be all of them. When a 2nd tier institution can just make an administrative change and basically get a free 1st round draft pick, there's going to be institutions that take the deal. It doesn't even really hurt the scholar, because they really don't need to be at Yale, they can be successful anywhere with strong students and plenty of money.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#26

Post by wildmusings »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #25
dredmorbius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate. This only works if a…

The reward for defecting is too high. It's a classic collective action problem.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#27

Post by dredmorbius »

wildmusings wrote: post #26
erikpukinskis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate. This only works if a…

The reward for defecting is too high. It's a classic collective action problem.

Textbook case.

Someone should write an article on that. And publish it ... Well, that's left as an exercise to the student.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#28

Post by smallnamespace »

wildmusings wrote: post #26
erikpukinskis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate. This only works if a…

The reward for defecting is too high. It's a classic collective action problem.

There's also no enforcement mechanism for punishing someone from defecting.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#29

Post by pks016 »

Related to this, I have one question.

Suppose one is going to write a paper and he need to add a reference of another paper which he has got from Sci-hub. So is there any check or any sorts of things of originality of reference paper ?

(I don't know exactly how publishing works)

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#30

Post by FabHK »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #5

In 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…

Ceterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum.
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