201–210 of 265 posts
"This money is effectively a surcharge, or tax, on scientific research imposed not by a government but by a for-profit industry. Imagine for a moment how much research could be carried out using these resources if they were channeled back into our academic enterprise."
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Piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience.
Is BitTorrent more convenient than Netflix?
Not being in a scientific field, one of the previous times this came up I asked if any of the working scientists felt like SciHub had positively impacted their work: exposing them to more papers than they would have read, guiding them in different ways, etc. and the answer was a pretty overwhelming "ohmygodyes". From the outside, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a public good. It certainly seems like l…
Is it right? I don't know. But it makes my life so much easier when looking for something specific.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience.
Is BitTorrent more convenient than Netflix?
Therefore, you would expect most people to opt for Netflix. (And by and large I'd expect Netflix to be more popular in mass than tormenting at this point for places where it's available.)
But what if it's not available where you live (That's inconvenient), doesn't have the content you want (That's inconvenient), or you want a file you can play offline that isn't allowed to be downloaded on the Netflix app?
Convenience wins almost every time, but not having the option to do something (be it for lack of $$$ or availability) isn't convenient so that's when more people turn to piracy.
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That’s the same excuse that’s trotted out in every field with a piracy problem—up until someone finds a way to do it and it turns out it wasn’t an insurmountable problem after all. That’s how we got iTunes, Spotify, Steam, Netflix, and so on.
It's not really an excuse - it truly is convenient in such a way that you only have to go to one place to get the thing you want. If I want Man in the High Castle, I have to pay for Amazon. But if I want Ozark, I need to pay for Netflix. If I want to watch Metropolis, or The Raven, or The Maltese Falcon, they're old and not any streaming service, even if the rights are owned by a studio. Where can I find them? Yup, b…
As a former scientist, and researching during the 90s, the publishing system that has arisen where a company can monopolise it, and by that, prevent access, is very unfortunate. No scientist wants their work to be unseen and hidden behind a paywall, but that is what has happened. Worse still, in some fields amateurs can make a reasonable contribution to the field (my experience is observation astronomy), and the curr…
Open access greatly helps the small researchers. The big guys can already buy access.
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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'm only trying to refute the claim that "piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience". That's disproven by the fact that many companies e.g. Steam have had undeniable success on the back of that convenience.
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A major reason, unfortunately, is that they don't want to be interfering with the distribution of scientific articles. For example, if there's a very well-read journal in a specific discipline, but whose contents are only visible with a subscription, then if one countries prevents its researchers from publishing in those journals, research by that country's researchers will be less read. And the reason they do not wa…
Eh, I think you're stretching in your interpretation of the causes of our current science publishing climate. As a current researcher, and former scientific publisher, I think most authors are interested in hitting certain "target" journals, it's a discussion that comes up early on in the research process. They want the right topic audience to read their work, and they want to publish in the highest impact factor jou…
Yes, that's what I was referring to in my ellipsis.
> To me, the problem is that scientists are highly motivated to achieve successes in publishing and prestige and impact, and they are less likely to stand in front of governments and demand open-access and freely circulated articles. This is not in their best interest
I agree that that is a crucial link in the vicious cycle that upholds the current system - I was merely giving a view in the motivations of why even the funders who are aware of the problem are not mandating Open Access without extra costs.
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I wouldn't state "voluntary" too strongly: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca... Sure, I can offer you the choice between death or a slap in the face, but if you'd choose the slap in the face, I wouldn't say you voluntarily asked for the slap in the face...
That dichotomy would only make sense if there were no means to self-publish or choosing a non-paywalled journal.