The same companies from whom this material is supposedly being 'stolen', also lobby against open access [0,1]. They corrupt laws to favour them and harm the public, then complain when the public doesn't respect those same laws.
It seems that for a large number of industries, at some point, the priorities largely shift from innovation to blocking competition and manipulation of various types.
I think it's really just time to shift the knob on the "for a limited time" part of the copyright/patent systems. It's obviously been extended too far, and applied too broadly.
I wholly agree, but suspect that this "begs the question" of the influence of money on politics, particularly in the U.S.A.
Copyright terms are a classic policy battleground where the organization that concerned citizens can muster pales against the focused interest of corporations, or oftentimes even of just one corporation.
Scientists of HN: what do you make of the fact that a grad student with few resources is the only person courageous enough to make all of your research available to the public?
What do you tell your students when the subject of sci-hub comes up? Do you think they should be inspired by what Elbakyan is doing? If so, do you tell them that in public?
In my experience, academia is set up to be an obstacle in every way to someone trying to legitimately improve collective human knowledge and understanding. The desires/thoughts of individual researchers are simply irrelevant.
People are ejected from the system if they don't/won't waste almost all their time and resources on dealing with bureaucracy and explaining basic stuff about logic and science to their superiors (who have been trained in NHST, or other bad practices that are obviously bad to everyone without a stake in ignoring it).
Not many people who really want to do science are going to waste their time dealing with that...
Scientists/Academics treat prestige as primary currency, and most would view lack of access to information just as a sign of not being in prestigious enough institution.
You are being naive if you think academia is filled with do-gooders it’s just a race but of another kind.
Unless there is a direct impact of doing something more openly e.g. accessible code base that thousands of researchers can use to publish and cite your work quickly or significant risk of getting scooped. There is very little to motivate any change.
Also if you think journals/review system is bad, just get a glimpse of “grant review” system by NSF/NIH or “tenure committees” etc. They make the worst stack ranking performance review etc. seem light hearted fun.
This is public and traceable to my real identity right now.
I've always had legal access to the content I need personally, so I've never had to actually use sci-hub -- but I appreciate that it's a huge equalizer for those less fortunate. It's generally considered a bad idea to publicly admit to copyright infringement, or else you might see sci-hub in paper acknowlegments [1].
In the first relevant survey I could find, however [2]
> 62.5% of participants affirmed that Sci-Hub contributes to scientific investigation; only 2.2% reported that Sci-Hub does not contribute to science.
More broadly, the open access movement has been around for years, and has made huge progress IMO considering that academia doesn't turn on a dime.
I should probably also point out that if sci-hub is napster, we've had a sneakernet for literally centuries. If you see a paper you like, just email one of the authors and they're very likely to send it to you. Prior to email, the same thing was done through regular mail -- to the point that many departments probably have a stack of "reprint request" postcards somewhere in the basement. They look like this [3]. See also the #ICanHazPDF hashtag for the social media version.
tl;dr: Scientific publishing wasn't always like this. Publication was run mostly by scientific societies, who would charge little more than the physical cost of printing, but were inefficient and had huge backlogs.
The shift to the current status quo was pioneered by a literal conman, Robert Maxwell, who saw an opportunity to build a "perpetual financing machine". Maxwell eventually moved on to massive pension fraud instead [1], but in the meanwhile succeeded in building up Pergamon Press (the Elsevier-before-Elsevier) into a juggernaut with 47% profit margins. A few particularly relevant quotes:
> As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars.
> Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted.
> Scientific conferences tended to be drab, low-ceilinged affairs, but when Maxwell returned to the Geneva conference that year, he rented a house in nearby Collonge-Bellerive, a picturesque town on the lakeshore, where he entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him. “He always said we don’t compete on sales, we compete on authors,” Albert Henderson, a former deputy director at Pergamon, told me. “We would attend conferences specifically looking to recruit editors for new journals.”
I'm not a practicing scientist, but I worked in a university lab in Canada once doing research alongside professors. The ones I spoke with generally tended to regard the journal system as a scam. However, they are bound to the prestige factor. Additionally, since almost all the time the fees are paid by the university and they have tenure, individuals felt little reason to try to change anything.
I refer students and colleagues to unpaywall.org - they have a great chrome extension that will take you to open access versions of papers with a single click when you're viewing the paper on pubmed, the publisher's site, etc. The proportion of papers that are OA is rapidly increasing so you can often find a suitable open access reference.
With regards to OA in general, the proportion of OA papers is rapidly increasing. While what Elbakyan has done has forced the field and society at large into a conversation about the availability of publicly funded research publications, the many proponents of OA have been working very hard to forward OA and have made huge progress in this area. All most people need to do is wait a few more years and it is likely that the majority of research publications will be OA.
Is what she doing inspiring? Yes and no. Personally, I find the Elseveir boycotts by Germany and Sweden to be more inspiring, as those represent large groups of individuals trying to enact change through more principled means.
> Personally, I find the Elseveir boycotts by Germany and Sweden to be more inspiring, as those represent large groups of individuals trying to enact change through more principled means.
Now that's a novel take IMO.
Imagine that the U.S. had some zany law that required publicly funded research to be licensed such that digital articles were freely redistributable.
In that universe Scihub would be engaged in legal behavior that is not principled in your opinion.
The person who's made the sci-hub is absolutely untolerable, sartre-like not-self-aware communist. But what she does is amazing. I never thought a commissar would teach me some tolerance.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/12/19...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/j...