<a href="https://gowers.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/another-journal-flips/" rel="nofollow">https://gowers.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/another-journal-flip...</a><p>Tim Gowers offers some background to the overwhelming case for open access publication. Sci-hub is an example of an almost inevitable reaction to the blatant profiteering by certain academic publishers. Let's remember that in the main, taxpayers across the world, through their governments, almost alone, pay for the very expensive business of carrying out university and institutional research and preparing manuscripts for publication.
I think the fundamental problem is that academics historically gave away their copyright [1]:<p>> Traditionally, the author of an article was required to transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers claimed this was necessary in order to protect author's rights, and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish instead.<p>I'd love to learn more about how this system evolved.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic_publishers" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic...</a>
Patents and copyrights in many cases have become a tumor, destroying their original purposes to enable rent seeking from disgusting and harmful organizations.
I cannot tell you how hilarious it is to me that the by-far-easiest part of research - the incredibly trivial act of posting a paper on a website - is the only part that is privatized and immensely profitable
I would be more supportive of their cause if Libgen was limited to academic books, but I've found nearly every fiction/nonfiction book I've wanted to on there; it was just a standard book piracy website to me.
A lot of people arguing about scientists should just publish to their “group” journal for free.
You all are missing a key piece though, these scientists are trained / conditioned to believe that getting “published in a top paid journal” is prestigious so they jump at the chance to do it.
We simultaneously need a campaign to make publishing in these paid journals unsexy _and_ have it be freely published.
There was a recent HN post about the Indian government considering buying a bulk subscription to scientific journals: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621809" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621809</a><p>Just my own 2c, part of what makes this whole thing so frustrating & confounding is that it's hard to tell how valuable a paper is going to be to you until you've read it. Reading abstracts gives some idea, but there's plenty of papers that end up being not that interesting. Given the extreme price these journals charge for individual access, the it becomes extremely hard to survey & locate & subsequently purchase relevant research.
While I am fairly sympathetic to the cause in the abstract, as someone who had to clean up after various incursions from the folks doing the mass downloading, the methods ... let's just say that they have externalities that I and many others end up having to deal with.