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symboom
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Should Knowledge Be Free?
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]
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Chemetix
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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.
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outer_limits
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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.
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Tsjerk
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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]
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Fyndium
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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.
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njl
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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.
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Tsjerk
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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?
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njl
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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.
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solo
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.....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
It's better to die on your feet, than live on your knees....Emiliano Zapata.
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Ubya
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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
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Fyndium
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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?
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andy1988
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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]
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Ubya
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| 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
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symboom
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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]
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Ubya
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| 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....
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Chemorg42
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| 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!
Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word. (attributed to Niels Bohr)
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. (Richard Feynman)
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Fyndium
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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.
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Tsjerk
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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]
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Fyndium
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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.
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brubei
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Perhaps paywall should expire after some years like patents.
Patents themselves were made to stimulate research and innovation.
I'm French so excuse my language
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arkoma
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| 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.
"We believe the knowledge and cultural heritage of mankind should be accessible to all people around the world, regardless of their wealth, social
status, nationality, citizenship, etc" z-lib
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gerrockium
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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.
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Dr.Bob
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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.
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Tsjerk
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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]
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MycoTricho
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I was unaware of Sci-Hub until now, so thanks for posting this.
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