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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

#71

Post by mcphage »

dalke wrote: post #53
jacobolus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’…

There is another solution - interlibrary loan. While it takes longer, you can often get papers for free or for a flat nominal cost. The local college ILL service will make a copy of any article in the world for $10 for the general public. The public library where I used to live would make ILL copies for free. It's not a great solution, but if you have more time than money, it's a possible alternative.

> but if you have more time than money, it's a possible alternative

Most people in academia have neither.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#72

Post by dalke »

mcphage wrote: post #71
dalke wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another solution - interlibrary loan. While it takes longer, you can often get papers for free or for a flat nominal cost. The local college ILL service will make a copy of any article in the world for $10 for the general public. The public library where I used to live would make ILL copies for free. It's not a great solution, but if you have more time than money, it's a possible alternative.

> but if you have more time than money, it's a possible alternative Most people in academia have neither.

I think this is meant for humor, as an expression of feeling overworked.

That's different than "no time."

If someone truly has no time to wait a week or two for an ILL request (I'll assume the local public library offers it as a free service) they they have no time to read the paper, no time to carry out research, and no time to write up the research.

How then do they plan on taking on a new project when they have no time?

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#73

Post by dineshp2 »

deepsun wrote: post #57
tomp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most answers only touch the issue of piracy of scientific articles, but let me answer your more general question. I believe that copyright is immoral, hence "piracy", for me, requires no further moral justification. Copyright is a racket, established by rent-seeking, mostly unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. It's a cartel/monopoly that discourages market competition, one of the most important inventi…

I would let content creator to decide what to do with his creation. I believe the author can do anything with it. For example, burn it, or set a price of $100500 per bit of information, and require customers to crawl on their knees ingratiatingly asking to buy it. Of course, no one would buy it that way, but author has ultimate right on his/her creation. One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but power…

Respectfully disagree.

There is an implicit acceptance of the current copyright system and the laws regarding copyright as it stands, in your comment.

Look at the big picture, we have created a society that thrives on imposing artificial restrictions on everyone and the only people who benefit from it are big corporations.

By giving complete rights over the invention to the inventor or a corporation, we are limiting the potential impact of the invention.

Instead if access to such knowledge is made freely available, the possibilities are endless.

What if Sir Tim Berners-Lee patented the World Wide Web and monetized it?

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#74

Post by kanzure »

DarkLinkXXXX wrote: post #58
3pt14159 wrote: post #51

Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?

What you describe is available through libgens scimag section, and I believe they're affiliated.

libgen scimag collection is not included in their torrents, nor usenet downloads, etc. Could someone ask them to fix this? thanks

edit: oh http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#75

Post by pasbesoin »

dalke wrote: post #68
pasbesoin wrote: post #10

One aspect of Aaron Swartz's case that I found both interesting and way under-reported, was that he supposedly was going to perform meta-analysis against the collected documents. And that a previous meta-analysis of a similar sort had revealed some surprising and useful results. With all the pieces locked up, it is difficult if not impossible to do such science and statistical analysis. In other words, it is antithet…

The Google n-gram project is an example of how one might extract useful information by indexing large numbers of documents. You might, for example, look at trends in the use of a given scientific instrument, or with a bit of NP, when the field switched from using "computer" to mean a machine instead of a person. It was an eye-opener to see how gendered the scientific papers were in the 1960s, where the scientist is i…

Also interesting, and more concerning, is that such meta-analyses are revealing biases (in the science), systemic deficiencies, and fraud. Very valuable and pertinent information to have.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#76

Post by indrax »

khedoros wrote: post #11
msvan wrote: post #5

Civil disobedience is an important form of democracy. Maybe in the future, when all of our calls, messages and identities are monitored in full by our benevolent overlords, we won't be able to practice it anymore. Right or wrong, faraway anti-Western countries have served as counterweights against the West for Snowden, Assange and Elbakyan.

> Maybe [...] we won't be able to practice it anymore. Do you mean by suppressing the action before it occurs? I thought that one of the points of civil disobedience was to get caught, so as to increase visibility of the problem and become a catalyst for change.

This is also Direct Action, where what you're doing is solving or mitigating the problem and so you want to keep doing it as long as you can.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#77

Post by namlem »

bcook wrote: post #6

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

For stuff like games and shows I generally pay, but these scientific articles are not like entertainment media. I would argue that it is the journals who are the pirates, and not the people downloading the articles. The scientists who do the research do not get paid for these articles. The peer reviewers also do not get paid, they work for free. The journals are 100% rent seeking. Much of this research was paid for by taxes too, which makes it even more insidious.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#78

Post by namlem »

bcook wrote: post #6

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

For stuff like games and shows I generally pay, but these scientific articles are not like entertainment media. I would argue that it is the journals who are the pirates, and not the people downloading the articles. The scientists who do the research do not get paid for these articles. The peer reviewers also do not get paid, they work for free. The journals are 100% rent seeking. Much of this research was paid for by taxes too, which makes it even more insidious.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#79

Post by namlem »

bcook wrote: post #6

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

For stuff like games and shows I generally pay, but these scientific articles are not like entertainment media. I would argue that it is the journals who are the pirates, and not the people downloading the articles. The scientists who do the research do not get paid for these articles. The peer reviewers also do not get paid, they work for free. The journals are 100% rent seeking. Much of this research was paid for by taxes too, which makes it even more insidious.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#80

Post by robertwalsh0 »

By and large, the academic publishing industry operates in such a way that it ignores the internet ever happened. The internet says, "Hey, you don't have 'Kant's Third Critique of Judgement in your inner-city school library. Here, let me tell you what it says" the academic publishing industry says "whoa- you're not at an institution that pays us money - you don't deserve to know what this says."

They try to make it seem like they do so much to push knowledge forward - but they take the paper you wrote in MSWord, take credit for the peer-review, then make it into a PDF and ask for your money.

The internet is going to destroy them and they are running scared. How long can you sustain a business that relies on paywalling PDF files?

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