Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Should Knowledge Be Free?

Should Knowledge Be Free?

symboom - 25-10-2020 at 23:08

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo

Should academic research be behind paywalls? Researchers and peer reviewers earn nothing for their work, and yet academic publishers boast enormous profit margins every year from subscription fees to journals. Especially during a global pandemic, is it right for scientific research to be pay-to-read?

[Edited on 26-10-2020 by symboom]

Chemetix - 26-10-2020 at 00:03

If the public purse has paid for the research, even a small amount, then the research needs to be public. If they don't want it to be open source then pay for the research in house and patent the idea rather than publish.

outer_limits - 26-10-2020 at 00:07

I agree. I don't see why I should pay for academic research papers written in my country where academic centres are funded from taxes which I pay.

Tsjerk - 26-10-2020 at 00:32

Publishing in an open access journal is usually expensive compared to not open access. If you want all research to be open access you have to start with the parties that fund the research, as a professor may very well choose to publish behind a paywall if that means he can buy some nice goodies with the money he saves. Especially if he knows all his colleagues have access to that journal anyway.

Edit: You probably have to change the whole system, if a professor can choose between a lower impact factor and higher impact factor for a couple thousand euro he will go for the higher one. All scientists are judged by the journal they publish in.

[Edited on 26-10-2020 by Tsjerk]

Fyndium - 26-10-2020 at 06:20

As long as the Sci-Hub works and is kept well fed, I can look the other way.

But generally, any research that's paid by tax money, must be public domain.

njl - 26-10-2020 at 06:45

Tsjerk I feel like open access journals being expensive to publish with is part of the problem though. In my opinion there shouldn't be a paywall in either direction.

Tsjerk - 26-10-2020 at 07:04

Quote: Originally posted by njl

Tsjerk I feel like open access journals being expensive to publish with is part of the problem though. In my opinion there shouldn't be a paywall in either direction.

Then how do you suggest the costs made to be covered?

njl - 26-10-2020 at 07:16

I am not well-versed in this topic and I'm not going to suggest some idealist plan, I just think that if you have something useful to share with the world you should be able to share it. If it's not actually useful then the community will ignore it, and if it is useful then great, your knowledge/work can be applied. To be clear you could still have some recognition for your contribution.

To answer your question I am ok with public funding for research as well as private research. To me, no matter how you uncover something I think it should be shared. Someone who works for a giant corporation might have a different view, and for now that's ok.

solo - 26-10-2020 at 08:34

.....i have always felt that access to information should be free to anyone interested in learning and furthering their knowledge ....and not to the privileged and excluding those with limited entry to the vast amount of information available.....hence, for the past 18 years i have tried to provide the information requested in many of the forums i participate....and now thanks to Sci Hub much of the requested information can be found freely on the net.....solo

Ubya - 26-10-2020 at 10:23

I hate paywalls, Sci-Hub is my best friend, even most of my uni professors use it when the chemistry department doesn't have a subscription for a particular journal, heck my thesis was done 90% from articles took from sci-hub.
I think many professors/researchers don't care much if their work is under a paywall or not, they are more interested on how important the journal is, and sadly most of the major journals have paywalls.

I simply think that journals are not used to common people browsing their archives, they expect researchers, students, professors, and they are not paying for their own subscription, the university/organization is.

I get that they need to make money somehow, but maybe they could set lower prices so more "common" people buy in.
I mean never in my life i would pay €70 to read an article that might be shit anyway, but if a subscription was like $5
a month, pretty much everyone would be able to afford it.
But as it has been already said, this would require a big change in perspective inside journals and in the scientific world in general, and this won't happen because a bunch of nerds want to read articles for free. We are the odd guy, the one in ten thousands, sadly our opinions don't hold much weight, so probably nothing will change.

Use sci-hub in the mean time, if more and more people use it maybe journals will try a different marketing strategy that doesn't involve shutting down that website every 2 weeks just to find a clone somewhere else the minute after

Fyndium - 26-10-2020 at 10:43

I suppose we need a database that is hosted similar to blockchain, so it cannot be taken down or monitored because it is hosted by a large number of hosts. Dream or a possibility?

andy1988 - 26-10-2020 at 10:49

There may be a political facet to it... looking at a heatmap for Sci-Hub usage world wide, Iran is a pretty big user. I wouldn't be surprised if publishers are prevented from allowing Iranian institutions access... and perhaps others targeted with sanctions. Great research coming from Iranian researchers by the way.

I've seen an article or two about how each institution's library has to negotiate prices with publishers, and per contract are not allowed to disclose what they paid with other institutions. Thus publishers have reign to ask for what they think each institution, and the student body via student fees, are able to pay. Harvard scoffed at such practices.

[Edited on 26-10-2020 by andy1988]

Ubya - 26-10-2020 at 10:52

Quote: Originally posted by Fyndium

I suppose we need a database that is hosted similar to blockchain, so it cannot be taken down or monitored because it is hosted by a large number of hosts. Dream or a possibility?

i would say dream, the bitcoin blockchain is already pretty heavy, and each transaction is just a line of text. Each member of the chain would need to host several terabytes of articles, plus being illegal we would simply all go to jail i think.

we could make a smaller private database maybe, downloading from scihub all the articles from 1 journal, or all the articles about the same generic topic, kinda like downloading a whole wikipedia category. Hosting it would be a nono on the web, but on the Thor network it is safer

symboom - 26-10-2020 at 11:00

I feel that paywalls slow down economic and scientific progress many patents are built on the work of those research articles. If the government paid in grants for the research only to have a company profit of that work being published I feel like In a way it is stealing intellectual property of that government.
So are paywalls theft?

[Edited on 26-10-2020 by symboom]

Ubya - 26-10-2020 at 11:22

Quote: Originally posted by symboom

I feel that paywalls slow down economic and scientific progress many patents are built on the work of those research articles. If the government paid in grants for the research only to have a company profit of that work being published I feel like In a way it is stealing intellectual property of that government.
So are paywalls theft?

[Edited on 26-10-2020 by symboom]

i don't think it is theft, the gov is paying the researcher, but it is not paying for the platform where this info is being diffused. Before internet journals were literally shipped to users, so people paid a subscription like for any magazine (you need to pay for shipping, for the paper, the ink, the worker making the pages, etc).

so i don't think they are stealing since they are still offering a service, hosting and organizing each article, but what i would consider stealing is asking a shit ton of money to access that material. Imagine if to watch a youtube video you had to pay €50....

Chemorg42 - 26-10-2020 at 12:31

Quote: Originally posted by njl

I am not well-versed in this topic and I'm not going to suggest some idealist plan, I just think that if you have something useful to share with the world you should be able to share it. If it's not actually useful then the community will ignore it, and if it is useful then great, your knowledge/work can be applied. To be clear you could still have some recognition for your contribution.

To answer your question I am ok with public funding for research as well as private research. To me, no matter how you uncover something I think it should be shared. Someone who works for a giant corporation might have a different view, and for now that's ok.

THIS, I use sci-hub when ever I need to read a paper. I can normally justify certain forms of piracy, but sci-hub is positively righteous!

Fyndium - 26-10-2020 at 22:51

For the interest, are articles over the world usually published by the native language of the authors, or are they also referred in english?

I sometimes wonder that there can be an ocean of information, but it's all written in terms I at first can't read without going through a translator, but more over, they do not show up in search results because of the language.

Tsjerk - 27-10-2020 at 00:30

Most literature is written in English, I know there are for example some German and French journals, but I don't know how much of that is not available in English somewhere else. I believe even those journals now require an English translation on the side.

In modern natural sciences I wouldn't worry too much about not being able to find things because of language. If you are interested in very old stuff, German can sometimes be handy. But at least it is ten times better than when you for example study archaeology and the few sources you could write your thesis on are books written in 100 year old German and French for example. I saw a friend of mine struggling with that once... but most chemistry is English.

[Edited on 27-10-2020 by Tsjerk]

Fyndium - 27-10-2020 at 02:34

Old chemistry articles can be really interesting for the amateur, because lack of all the sophisticated and astronomically expensive and complicated tools in modern labs made them use rudimentary methods in reach of amateur.

I also found that some forensic journals can be interesting, because they depict methods more common for amateur reagent sourcing, for example one article tested the efficiency of common detergents as an oxidizer and they optimized very good results by just using directly the impure product. These can provide excellent shortcuts since reagents in pure form are neither not available at all or come at very high price compared to their role, meanwhile the substitute can be sold at local grocery store for few bucks a pound. In professional lab, especially in research where the price tag doesn't matter at all, it is easy just to order everything ready in acs grade.

brubei - 27-10-2020 at 04:51

Perhaps paywall should expire after some years like patents.

Patents themselves were made to stimulate research and innovation.

arkoma - 27-10-2020 at 08:20

Quote: Originally posted by solo

.....i have always felt that access to information should be free to anyone interested in learning and furthering their knowledge ....and not to the privileged and excluding those with limited entry to the vast amount of information available.....hence, for the past 18 years i have tried to provide the information requested in many of the forums i participate....and now thanks to Sci Hub much of the requested information can be found freely on the net.....solo

ABSOLUTELY agree, and Thank You, in your several incarnations, for doing this.

gerrockium - 27-10-2020 at 16:07

hello guys, first post here, i've been browsing the forum several years ago, the idea of the periodic publication journal brough my attention and im planning on being more active user.

about the topic, here is my opinion: information is invaluable (financially, it cannot cost anything), there are some tools that rely on the "perfect information value" to support certain decisions but those are specific cases.

I think that the matter of concern of sci hub is about the copyrigth. because the cost of the article is being covered by the one who shares the article but the LICENSE doesnt permit sharing whitout the author conscent... is the same problem as whith physical books, before pdf's and web sites, make a copy of a book was prohibited.

Dr.Bob - 5-12-2020 at 06:45

Patents expire after typically 17-20 years (there have been some variations), but noaways many items are obsolete after 20 years, so that provides a lot of protection. Copywrite laws originally were about 20-50 years (in various countries), but coporations lobbied to make the longer, so now they can be as long as 120 years or more. Disney, book publishers, and others have tried to effectively keep material copywriten forever. Efforts were made many years ago to claim that was unconstitional, but the courts sided with business.

But knowledge is not copywritable, only presentation. So if people were to create wiki sites with chemical information, reaction information, and other factual matter, that is legal, and the data can come from copywriten sources, just not copied verbatim. So any compilation of knoledge is allowed, and that is one way to help, like Wikipedia, Googles books, and many other databases. Public policy is moving towards all publicly funded research needing to be open access within a shorter time, so in time, it should get better.

Already, almost all medical articles are freely available on PubMed within a year of publication, so as Europe and the US move that way with other science research, the situation may improve, but not as fast as I would like. I often could not even view my own articles in journals directly, but nowadays most arthors are given unloacked PDFs of their own articles that they can share easily, so if arthors just created their owm database of their own articles, it would go a long way towards solving this issue.

So I hoppe that eventually we will find ways to better share science info, it is slow, but clearly improving, and maybe with some work, we can convince the government to only fund publically shared research, which will force publishers to find ways to do open access. I agree that there are costs to editing papers, publishing journals, etc but there are also better ways to pay for that than the current system. I hope that open access text books also eventually wipe out for profit ones, in most widely used areas (math, basic subjects, egineering, etc), as that is a big scam, mostly enabled by professors who profit from it. But for small niche areas, like medical specialties, highly technical areas, microelectronics, etc, where the costs of publishing are high, and the contect is quickly out dated, it will be harder to change. No one wants a doctor who only reads old articles, or a cell phoine based on 2001 technology.

Tsjerk - 5-12-2020 at 07:07

There would be one simple solution to all of this, and sometimes it is already done. A grant giver can demand the research to be published in an open access journal.

Although the grant giver would of course only do that when they don't expect the work to be published in a Nature subjournal for example.

[Edited on 5-12-2020 by Tsjerk]

MycoTricho - 5-12-2020 at 08:46

I was unaware of Sci-Hub until now, so thanks for posting this.

clearly_not_atara - 5-12-2020 at 12:21

In context of copyright I think it is always important to remember that copyright was set up over the 15-18th centuries in Europe as a means of producing more art. It is not a classical moral tradition of human beings to award artists exclusive control over the distribution of their works. It is an economically focused law that was created to generate practical benefits.

As such, if copyright is no longer bringing practical benefits, it should be modified, perhaps gradually to respect the fair expectations of people who produced works under the expectation of a certain legal regime. But nobody should be fooled into believing that authors or publishers have a natural "right" to this system. It is an artificial system, created by governments and economists, for the benefit of the public at large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

symboom - 6-12-2020 at 01:21

Here is some interesting information

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Discovery

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science
benefits of applying the philosophy of open science to research

Open science is the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, and generally making it easier to publish and communicate scientific knowledge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-notebook_science

The Open Notebook Science Challenge, now directed towards reporting solubility measurements in non-aqueous solvent, has received sponsorship from Submeta, Nature and Sigma-Aldrich

karlos³ - 6-12-2020 at 12:20

Luckily we have sci-hub.
By the way, have you noticed how much weight Alexandra has gained?

She looks like a stereotypical babushka now

nitro-genes - 6-12-2020 at 16:50

Wow, nice story about Alexandra Elbakyan...Sounds like a smart woman, with a clear and realistic, open and progress based vision...I think in the face of history...way ahead of her time!!!

https://qz.com/1773765/sci-hub-creator-says-shes-not-working...

Terrible how the 3 letter organisations tried to smear her...Haha, saying it was them Russians again, Hahahaha their close mindedness is only rivaled by their complete lack of "cold war era" type creativity! Not a single one of the arguments put forward on the motive of the Russians makes any logical sense. I bet they just saw it as a incredible danger... all that "dangerous knowledge" available to anyone. Well hellooooo...cold war is over...21st century of freely available scientific information and education has arrived.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/will-next-scientif...
https://www.the-scientist.com/news/amateur-scientists-making...

After some personal experiences with these people... these people are driven obsessively by control , paranoia and fear...the worst decision making motives there are. IMO they should be put on a far bigger leash by law... and a committee of better educated and smarter people should be appointed to make sure they don't impart control over things they just are aren't able to understand or see the implications of.

Smearing and intimidating people like that is how they operate and has nothing to do with justice or the law.

[Edited on 7-12-2020 by nitro-genes]

yobbo II - 7-12-2020 at 18:17

If you really want my answer you going to have to pay>>>>>>>>>>>>

Yob

arkoma - 7-12-2020 at 19:42

"Information Wants To Be Free"

In my opinion, The Galaxy's Most Resilient Bittorrent Site, The lovely Pirate Bay along with B-OK are the largest,freest (as in un-censored/regulated aside from cost) libraries to ever exist since we started writing.