I was recently playing the 1995 space exploration game Ascendancy. One of the structures that you can build on a planet is an internet. The effect of building this on a planet was to double a planet's total research output. That's how the internet was viewed in 1995 by starry-eyed game developers.<p>I wish we returned to that 1995-era optimism of what the internet was about. An internet should have made traditional journals obsolete. It shouldn't be taking this long.
I know this has been talked to death, but there's an aspect I haven't seen addressed.<p>This piece says "and in disregard of the rules imposed on distribution by the copyright holders." Others say something similar.<p>How many of those articles in SciHub are not covered by copyright? For example, if the author is a US government employee, then there is no copyright. I've seen many articles with a footnote that says it isn't covered by copyright because of that, though I can't tell if it's even 1%.<p>There are also articles which are just the schedule for an upcoming meeting. (This is especially true in the older literature.) These aren't covered under copyright because there is no creative input.<p>I don't think it's enough to be really significant, but it does make me wonder what the reaction would be to a no-copyright-applies version of Sci-Hub.<p>It would still be in "disregard of the rules imposed on distribution by the" distributor, but at least it would help tease out which complaints are due to copyright infringement and which are due to breaking a distribution agreement.
It's crazy how expensive science journals are. Philosophy journals are much more reasonable, typically 35-50 dollars a year for an individual subscription. That gives you some idea of what it actually costs to produce a journal.<p>Unrelated point: with 50 million articles, I wonder if Sci-Hub is looking into ipfs. That would solve the danger of getting knocked off-line by legal action.
Scientific publishing is different from other things.<p>If it is an ordinary book or a movie or something, the creator(s) of the creative work gets paid for it through royalties.<p>Scientists, for the most part, receive public money to do research, and then Elsevier expects to get paid again for what we already paid for. It seems to me that if my taxes go to support research I should be able to read it, and if it is the developing or developed world it doesn't matter.
If we, as the human race, want to avoid upcoming desasters, not that i am summoning them, neither predicting those, we have an obligation to make research and its gains available to all mankind.<p>Financial burdens are a stone in our all way, be it in the taxpayer who funds R&D, or be it the institutions that want to profit from it.<p>There cannot be a "middle ground", we all have to stand back for the greater benefits of free flowing knowledge.<p>That is a principle of the "web" itself, profit from open data, but also keep personal data protected. Easy as that.<p>There will be no win in restricting access to scientific research in the end, but to keep corporate interest and greed alive. I fear that future.<p>Edit: Institutions.
People keep on saying that academic journals provide no value, since all of the work is being done by the scientists anyway. I have another take on this. I think that they're providing a (virtual) meeting place for scientists. Just like banks, whose job is to provide a meeting place for people who want to stash away their money in a deposit and other people who need to buy a new house. From this point of view, the sooner journals stop extorting readers for reading the articles, the better. The readers are innocent bystanders in this game, and in any case free distribution of research is in the best interest of the players (the scientists).
It still leaves the discussion of <i>“what motivates people in a non-profit economy?”</i>. In the science community - probably more than anywhere else - this is peer recognition (which can eventually be turned into money in the form of higher research budgets / government grants / salaries).<p>As it’s perfectly established to compete for peer recognition online (Hackernews frontpage, Facebook likes, Retweets...) I think Sci-Hub can do wonders here. Why not introduce “Paper of the day”, “Most read article in Neuroscience this month”, “most discussed research”?
Why are these discussions always so short sighted?<p>People seem to continually tunnel in on tiny aspects of the world.<p>It doesn't matter whether my car has a carburettor or not. What matters is that the wheels turn and I get where I need to go.<p>What matters, is that people who produce research, useful research, are permitted to eat, to raise families, to learn, to live a generally reasonable life.<p>How we do that is the interesting question. Not these myopic arguments about IP and copyright.
I suggest to anyone interested in this subject to read the book "Piracy" by Adian Johns, <a href="http://www.adrianjohns.com/piracy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.adrianjohns.com/piracy/</a>