171–180 of 265 posts
Companies do this, they keep the research results of their employees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it very hard? Take a look at the most successful platform for games, Steam, to see both things aren't mutually exclusive.
There is a huge difference between Steam and Elsevier and I'm not sure why you feel the one is an example of how the other could evolve. The one sells games for entertainment purposes to the masses, the other sells subscriptions to scientific institutions to give them access to research papers. It's b2c vs b2b and a competitive space versus a captive audience.
It was a mess of custom launchers, DRM, losing the CD/DVD or key so people would turn to piracy to access stuff they already owned.
Fast-forward a few year and most people are fine with Steam as long as it's the unified launcher for doing thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a huge difference between Steam and Elsevier and I'm not sure why you feel the one is an example of how the other could evolve. The one sells games for entertainment purposes to the masses, the other sells subscriptions to scientific institutions to give them access to research papers. It's b2c vs b2b and a competitive space versus a captive audience.
I think the parent comment was referring to video game piracy before Steam. It was a mess of custom launchers, DRM, losing the CD/DVD or key so people would turn to piracy to access stuff they already owned. Fast-forward a few year and most people are fine with Steam as long as it's the unified launcher for doing thing.
If there were a disruption of the world of scientific publishing that would have a parallel in entertainment I would have chosen Spotify over Steam.
If we all got to seeding, surely we’d have the oppressors bent over a filthy toilet in no time at all.
Until the cops kick your door in on copyright infringement charges to "make an example" of someone. Don't think it can't happen.
What I don't get is...why don't governments simply declare that all research at publicly funded universities must be made available to the public. It's seems so trivial. You pay the researchers, you get the research results, you make it available for all citizens (or the world). Companies do this, they keep the research results of their employees.
(That is, if they are actually actively aware of and see it as a problem. Lots of governments/funders also don't have an active Open Access policy, although this is starting to change.)
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I was a researcher at a reasonably big UK University until about 6 months ago, and I used SciHub fairly regularly. Sometimes I used it because we didn't have the right subscription for that publisher to get me the journal I needed, but mainly I used SciHub to access papers I already had the "right" to access. The layers of logins screens, buggy single-sign-on systems, having to be in the right IP address range, not b…
Piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience.
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Definitely a great resource, but (thankfully) it's almost completely redundant in a lot of fields. I'm willing to bet almost no one in my department has ever actually used it, or even heard of it, thanks to preprint servers like arXiv where almost everyone publishes their work for free on their own (usually either before or after publishing in a real journal, but some subfields have taken to exclusively publishing th…
I wish there was a an arXiv for mechanical engineering, sadly most of the research is funded by industrial companies seeking competitive advantage so papers are less freely shared. Most of my masters thesis research sources came from paid-by-industry research projects.
And if that's not your cup of tea, that's fine too; I don't mean this as a "put up or shut up". Just putting up an idea you may not have had.
Has anyone with uni lib credentials done random hash checks on some of the PDFs from sci-hub?
Not sure that would work, since pdfs are usually marked or prepended with some metadata about download time and the library upon download. At least that's the case with my uni library.