Slashdot Mirror
How Scientists Are Circumventing Journal Paywalls (bbc.co.uk)
Bruce66423 writes: Some academics are fighting back against publishers of academic journals by providing copies of papers to researchers who don't have access. For some reason, the publishers aren't happy! Cognitive scientist Andrea Kuszewski said, "Basically you tweet out a link to the paper that you need, with the hashtag and then your email address. And someone will respond to your email and send it to you." That begins the conversation, and then the scientists cover their tracks: "Once contact is made, all subsequent conversation is kept off of social media — instead, scientists correspond via email. The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands. Kuszewski and others say the method is necessary to get up-to-date research in the hands of academics from developing countries, and her and other scientists say they consider the pirating 'civil disobedience' against a system that includes for-profit publishing companies."
Due to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act law he was looking at $1 million in fines and / or 35 years in prison. And he took the suicide way out.
Now with the TPP things can be just as bad or worse.
D.M.C.A.!
We must stamp out this blatant sharing of important scientific information lest the poor publishers go broke, and end up in the street, naked and hungry and homeless!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Now if somebody could put together an open-source tool to automate this. The tricky part would be making sure that the requester doesn't get twenty thousand copies of the paper she asked for...
Why would Libertarians oppose this? Most oppose Intellectual Monopoly laws. Now if you had a contract with a publisher that you wouldn't republish I guess that could hurt your reputation but there shouldn't be anything illegal about it.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I posted my preprints to arXiv just prior to submission and any published papers I put on my website. A journal has never complained at me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Why the subterfuge? The paper's author owns the copyright on the final draft text and figures, just not the formatted version with the journal's page layout. PDF link to it from the publications section of their faculty homepage and job done?
I was under the understanding that, at least in the US, papers resulting from public funding should already be in the public domain.
On some university website,e.g. MIT, Harvard Stanford. Timely means within one year of a journal publication, as compromise for journal companies and busy professors.
The chief drawback of this system is that important papers are scattered all over the place. If you are looking something specific you can find it with a search engine. But if you are periodically browsing the literature to catch up on ideas you may not see these articles unless someone ahas constructed an index.
LOL! Author's cut? Don't be ridiculous.
I've worked at several research universities over the years. The "official" way to get articles for journals you don't subscribe to is usually to make an interlibrary loan (ILL) request. In theory it works similarly to what was just described, in that the request is out to a large pool of libraries and then one will (usually) reply fairly quickly with the article.
The problem though is the inconsistent quality. The optimal method is for the library to download the article themselves and then send along the PDF unaltered; some do this. Others see this as a violation of the subscription terms and will only respond by scanning a print journal if they have it, and sending the scan, this is slightly worse. Even worse yet I have had some where the library "loaning" the article will download it, print it, then scan it in grey scale on some awful scanner from the 80s, add their cover page, then send that as a PDF. (Note that the libraries never need the article to come back from "loan" as it is all digital.) This process usually takes 1-3 working days depending on availability, motivation, trade winds, phases of the moon, etc.
If this system worked better there would be less need for researchers to directly circumvent the system through twitter. Even better of course would be if fewer journals were paywalled at all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I was under the understanding that, at least in the US, papers resulting from public funding should already be in the public domain.
This is only now starting to be mandated by funding agencies. Previously, even publicly funded research was routinely paywalled behind incredibly expensive journal subscriptions.
Wow that would be nice!
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
If you have so much fear that you seriously try to "hide the tracks", the Big Press wins.
There's nothing to fear. This is fair use. Don't get conditioned by Big Press propaganda.
Speaking as a scientist this activity has a certain whiff of hypocrisy about it though. If we all published our papers in open access journals, which is now almost ubiquitous in particle physics, there would be no need to smuggle copies of papers to anyone and then even those who lack the contacts or are concerned about legal repercussions can read the papers too. It also helps to undermine the increasingly oppressive copyright laws which governments are foisting on all of us.
The abstracts are available. You can find who wrote it. If I need a paper I email one of the authors and they send it.
People email me asking for papers I wrote.
Why the need for tweeting?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Who is the bigger thief here?
The one "stealing" education in order to potentially advance Humanity as a whole by effect of getting educated,
or the one stealing potential innovation and scientific progress from Humanity by restricting access to education that should realistically be free for all.
Not to mention that the authors of most academic journals are plagiarists themselves, and that most of the journals are never purely original, but build upon previous scientific minds and research.
Telegram is one of those chat apps that is very secure, compared to WhatsApp etc.
Then create a secret chat from the group discussion to facilitate other proceedings and delete the chat (and evidence of it by default) once you're done.
Article? what article?
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
As a researcher, on multiple occasions I've wanted access to a paper from some bupkis journal with an impact factor of 0.5 that no institution/university has access to only to see that they want $30 before I can even check if it contains any information that's of interest to me (abstracts aren't generally enough). Solution? Send an email to one of the authors asking for their paper. Everyone wants their work to be more widely distributed/visible as that gets them citations on top of that warm feeling of knowing that someone out there actually cares about something you did.
Twitter has absolutely no effect on this and is just a buzzword as ResearchGate already helps you get in touch with other researchers from a number of fields, and a simple search for an author and their affiliation gets you the right email address 10 times out of 10. In fact, looking for an email address is simpler than a Twitter account because you know that the email address exists whereas not every researcher is on Twitter.
Do you even know who Aaron is?
#icanhazpdf
"her and other scientists say"
Come on, "she and other scientists say".
Think of the children! This paywall loophole in unacceptable in any decent society.
Seriously, it cost us something like $15k to put out something Pluto-related...
So you're telling me there's a "scientist" somewhere who wants to restrict knowledge pervasiveness to the elite that can pay for academic journal subscriptions. And here I was thinking journals were just a curation service for good science, and that all good scientists pursued human development among all other things. For someone who already knows the title of an article, I'm guessing there's no longer a need for the "curation" - the requester is only asking for what the article, in essence, had to go through in order to be curated: PEER FKING REVIEW.
Somewhere along the path to "will to power", I guess money and self-development took priority for this type of "scientists". I'm calling Coca-cola on this Andrea Kuszewski and bet there's some financially-induced bias here (just like coke does with sugar research) - no decent scientist would defend restriction of his or her articles based on "for-profit publishing", nor any member of academia, nor education institutions of any kind (even for-profit ones) want to encumber human development. If anything, scientists crave approval, validation, or whatever you wanna call it. I see nothing encumbering validation with a person requesting access to a document they feel they need to read.
Was.
A security researcher has fair use as long as it's in support of research. The New York Times paywall can be circumvented as simply as deleting the cookies. Perfectly legal.
nothing to see here - move along
He broke the law very blatantly. He had other tools available to accomplish the same ends but opted for the one that was maximally disruptive and maximally destructive.
So did the North American Colonies and their Continental Army.
As a USA taxpayer, I would enthusiastically want my tax money to be used to expand the Library of Congress to serve as a free online repository for all scientific papers.
A significant amount of scientific research is partly funded by my tax dollars anyway. If I'm paying for part of that research, then I demand to see those papers for free. This is a taxpayer's rights issue.
The fact that the for-profit scientific publishing industry still exists is an absolutely disgrace. Nobody should profit from holding scientific information hostage. The government shouldn't make it illegal (that's a free speech violation) but the government should simply provide it as a service, making the leeches' business model infeasible.
The abstracts are always available, and nearly universally include the author's email address. I've yet to meet a scientist who wasn't enthusiastic to email a copy of their article to me. And I've had plenty of requests for my own papers that I've responded to, usually within hours or minutes. I don't think that the amount of delay incurred materially slows down the pace of scientific research. Frankly, I've got a pile of papers on my desk I'm meaning to read, all of which are days old, if not older. While this method of dissemination may be slightly annoying, it works very well for modern papers. Something published decades ago can be a lot harder to find via email, but generally it's a lot more useful to read current research than older results.
This isn't limited to the scientific community, although the insanely expensive journal subscriptions magnify the problem in that area. The problem is that content is increasingly not "printed" and therefore the journals' role is less relevant now. This happens with interlibrary loan of things like eBooks and media, as well as journals. The problem is that wherever you get it from, and whatever DRM timebombs the content, some library has to buy the journal subscription to get the content in the first place.
I'm not sure what the solution is. It's another one of those disruptive things that could put a lot of people out of work and change the scientific landscape. If everyone just publishes whatever they want, where's the quality bar set for research? Don't the journals curate content submissions? This would also force academics to be graded on a different scale for tenure, etc. if "number of accepted submissions" doesn't mean anything anymore.
Given a paper isn't the entire publication and they're for use in education wouldn't fair use apply anyway?
- many years ago, grad students used to use their university webspace to take grainy GIFs of papers (especially for papers that didn't so well with OCR, like chemistry papers) and publish them that way.
- about 17 years ago, I remember there being Livejournal communities dedicated to grad students sharing the PDFs of journal articles (once they became widely available)
- then people just started sharing proxy accounts to get the articles directly
nothing new here, just because it involves Twitter doesn't instill novelty to an old idea.
-
One far simpler way is to have a tech-report on the web with the same title, and basically the same contents. At least in the CS field, you can more often than not get something very close to the published version by simply googeling the title.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Libertarians don't oppose this. The companies publishing papers don't have a "right" to stay in business.
While the current system may have made sense in the days of physically published journals it doesn't anymore.
Authors aren't paid.
Authors provide articles in required format.
Reviewers aren't paid
There is no need for this industry to remain. There is no need for the government to subsidize them. And Libertarians don't support the subsidizing of companies.
The only reason to keep the information private is if the researchers (authors) of the article wanted to keep it behind closed doors. Which, of course, doesn't make much sense. Why would one publish something if one wanted to keep the research private.
The only libertarians who may argue for this are those who don't understand that the creators of the information and the reviewers of the information (the parties responsible for the intellectual content) want the information to be disseminated and they don't directly receive compensation for their research. (Of course the University system has the "publish or perish" concept. But that's a separate issue regarding compensation.)
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Science is the practice of judging by appearances.
If you STEAL someone else's articles, you don't SEE the consequences.
Science !
Only a judge can officially rule on that, on a case-by-case basis. So the copyright holder has to sue first.
I say let 'em sue--let's establish a precedent!
Pay, and then find out its crap? Reminds me of the record companies only wanting to sell the whole CD...
He broke the law very blatantly. He had other tools available to accomplish the same ends but opted for the one that was maximally disruptive and maximally destructive.
Disruptive? Sure.
Destructive? Not a single bit.
If it helps society (science/education), I'm all for piracy. I think free information is good for society. It costs close to nothing to share information, so artificially trying to charge for it seems shady.
God spoke to me
Journals were once curators of information relevant to a subject for areas of interest outside the reach of traditional library curation.
Library science has been quietly and revolutionarily been relegated to obsolescence in the age of the internet.
Journals would be functionally relegated to the same fate were it not for an additional value they add to academia...the constant search for prestige and citation that academia demands.
A Nature pub simply offers more social intangibles than Arxiv.
More societal benefit might be derived from other open access alternatives, but those alternatives offer no career and personal intangible benefits in the way that Nature offers.
Maybe you should look at ResearchGate.net - its a solution that works well.
The goal seems to be to eliminate the journal publishers. Why not cut them out now? If this catches on they'll get out of the business eventually anyway.
He broke the law very blatantly. He had other tools available to accomplish the same ends but opted for the one that was maximally disruptive and maximally destructive.
Destructive? Not a single bit.
He entered a wiring closet in the library. In so doing he destroyed the access of other patrons to resources and created a physical safety hazard as well. He was destructive by choice.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
He broke the law very blatantly. He had other tools available to accomplish the same ends but opted for the one that was maximally disruptive and maximally destructive.
So did the North American Colonies and their Continental Army.
Your comment should have been moderated (+1, funny) rather than the (+1, insightful) that it was given. Frankly I'm not sure if you could come up with a more absurdly disconnected example to compare him to than the continental army, unless you want to go full Auschwitz and claim he was in line for the gas chamber before he entered the library wiring closet.
I support the notion that the information should be free. However his methods were idiotic. He could have accomplished the same in only marginally more time from his own desk, rather than entering a wiring closet, disrupting the work of all the people in the library, and creating a physical safety hazard.
Furthermore your continental army comparison doesn't hold water as the members of the army were willing to stand trial for their efforts. Swartz was not, he took the coward's way out in his quest for martyrdom.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Here's the short ruling you requested: Congress granted copyrights, exercising a directly enumerated power. And they also have the power of the purse, and never attached instructions to not copyright papers from that science.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It would not only be nice but also aid science by allowing others to build on previous research instead of having to reinvent the wheel.
But it seems we're not allowed to have nice things if that gets into the way of the all important profit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And clearly the situation arises because someone holds a gun to the author's head, forcing them to submit the article to the journal which has all these things written in contracts, instead of just posting it somewhere else, thus a clear violation of NAP.
Mother Theresa is a poor choice if you're going for contrast, she was a fairly sadistic and hypocritical person who denied seriously ill people actual medical treatment in her "hospitals", denied the sick contact with their families, and got nothing but the best medical treatment for herself when illness reared its head.
Now that's a bit of a stretch.
Long time ago (1970s) I remember helping my old man handle reprint requests for papers he had published. When people did not have access to journals they could send a reprint request to the author and he would send (and he would pay for the mailing) a copy of a particular paper they asked for. Most of the requests were international. That's how they shared back then.
Suicide is not an act of cowardice. It is an unfortunate act of desparation from a combination of internal and external influences.
There is a need for someone to archive these things and ensure that they are preserved for future researchers. That said, I'd be quite happy leaving that responsibility with the professional societies - IEEE, etc.
This form of civil disobedience is great. I have also seen academics sharing there access to those journals with friends/colleagues. The best way is to stop publishing in such journals. One of the reasons such publishers have been successful is because there standards for accepting a publication is really low. Many times researchers are also abusing the publication process and submitting the same research to multiple journals.
If publicly funded research being public domain is true, which I believe it is, then providing such articles on a website is legal, regardless of the journal's wishes or contract clauses.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
My understanding is that a lot of scientific work are funded via public money, yet the copyright gets assigned to private entities. In the context of copying vs. 'taking', their behavior is closer to 'taking' than what the researchers are doing. Simply because they prevent access to it by others.
If viewed as a public "investment", limiting access to the knowledge actually reduces the "payback" by not spreading the findings to anyone who wants it. This in turn probably lowers overall quality by having fewer (and perhaps less qualified) people examining the findings.
The above arguments hinges on it being publically funded research.
Personally I value that the researchers are more interested in spreading knowledge and solving real problems than adhering to something as byzantine and riduculus as the current copyright laws. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" was their stated purpose; when they are clearly retarding progress what is the solution? Reform them? Or get your work done, for the benefit of all of humanity?
Maybe at the very least we need an exception, like fair use for scientific purposes?
There are a number of mailing lists for librarians in various fields. I'm on multiple ones for the type of science that I support. (some more specific than others). Most of ones I'm on will get you a PDF within a day, often within an hour or two.
Mind you, there's also the rare cases of trying to track down articles when you don't have the full reference, or trying to find translations of articles ... those don't always come through. Or when the 'official' version being distributed is a scan, and they need someone to find the print version so they can get a clearer scan for a diagram, or in color ... those are starting to take longer and longer as libraries get rid of their print archives.
The thing with ILL though, is that it has to be library-to-library, so non-librarians can't be the ones making contact for the exchange. Personally, I think it'd be easier to set up a repository in the country that's allowed to ignore US copyright (Antigua/Barbuda), and make it all self-service.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If the scientists were actually employed by the government and their contract specified that the research would be owned by the USG, then yes, the research would be public domain because the USG is prohibited from holding copyrights (could still be marked CLASSIFIED or FOUO though). If, on the other hand, the government gave a grant to a private institution and did not stipulate that the work product would belong to the government, then the institution will usually get to keep the IP.
You sound like someone who's never encountered the tenure process.
Aren't colleges gun-free zones?
So you are saying that a pharmaceutical company will have the choice of stopping research when the quantity spent hits a certain amount, or carry on the 'bet' further. And of course 'per dose' is imprecise; do you mean 'per course of treatment', 'per pill, or per daily dose', or quite what?
The role of newspapers, scientific journals and even bloggers is to decide what their audience is interested in from the mass of data that the person who is the editor has coming across their desk. In effect you are buying that service when you pay for a journal. On a good day the journal will only publish what it regards as high quality research (as determined by the people doing peer reviews) and is a genuine advance in the field. The highest reputation journals get to be the most picky etc etc. Given the tidal wave of research in every field under the sun, we now have a serious problem of duplication of research; journals can be helpful in reducing the probability that people will end up doing exactly the same stuff. Self publication fails to address those issues.
I come in here and see some dumb comment to respond to, and then I look at who wrote it...
The blame falls directly upon the "scientists" who submit their work to.these journals.
The only way to create a free and open forum is to change the submissions process.
If the scientific community can't even find a way to freely disseminate their work, they
sure aren't going to find a cure for cancer or much else in this century.
Good Luck!
Is there truly no limit to the depth of knowledge you share with slashdot? We are so greatly indebted to your awesomeness.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I never understood comments like yours.
Just because someone is not willing to stand trial or "accept the consequences" for their actions doesn't invalidate their initial actions.
Civil disobedience doesn't somehow become morally wrong because you don't want to go to trial, "face the music", or allow yourself to be arrested. The idea is that by breaking some laws, you call attention to the injustice of those laws. Getting arrested may or may not help with that, but it has nothing to do with whether or not the law was wrong in the first place.
If Rosa Parks had decided not to allow herself to be arrested and fought back physically against the cops who arrested her, she likely would have been violently arrested, even beaten, but that would not have invalidated her initial refusal to move from her seat.
Edward Snowden's disseminating of the information he took from the NSA is valuable information everyone needs to know about how our government spies on its own citizens. His running from the law has nothing whatsoever to do with that; that information is valuable to all Americans whether or not he broke the law, so why do we care if he "faces the music"?
Edward Snowden's disseminating of the information he took from the NSA is valuable information everyone needs to know about how our government spies on its own citizens. His running from the law has nothing whatsoever to do with that; that information is valuable to all Americans whether or not he broke the law, so why do we care if he "faces the music"?
I'm not sure why you brought up Snowden, he was not part of this discussion up to this point. We were talking about Swartz, who in now way was exposing any kind of government spying or great injustice.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Well, scientists aren't all puppy dogs and rainbows either.
Exactly my point. They need the publishers, but they want to get rid of the publishers.
Every brand of pen has its own in house designed mechanism for the clicker.
I'm sure they are all very glad that they spent thousands of dollars on patents so other companies would reinvent the clicker instead of paying a cent in royalties.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Just stick with me kid.
So, I basically think everything should be self-hosted, or by university libraries, or professional organizations or something. I don't even believe in open-access pay-to-publish journals in the standard sense.
However, you're oversimplifying things in a way that's unfair to publishers of journals. True, you do submit things in the "required format," but that's the format required for copyediting, which is the process by which your crappily formatted manuscript is turned into something that's actually pleasant to look at, and is edited for typos and poor writing is smoothed out. Journals also provide editorial system support, which is ridiculously important (and obvious to anyone who's edited a journal) and indexing, dois, citation format support, etc.
The journal publishers do a lot, for an audience that's very small.
Now, are things maybe overpriced given the streamlining of electronic media? Sure. But I sure as hell would rather have pay-to-access than pay-to-publish, which basically is advertising (and used to be required to be marked as such--journals like that have been around for decades, and they always were marked in that way).
This is the way I see it: if you really want your research to be freely available, publish it on your website, or in an open archive, or a library archive, or something. If you want it to be pretty, and want it to go through a systematic editorial process, etc. then the users of the product--i.e., the readers, whether individually, or through libraries, or professional memberships--should pay for that service.
The pay-to-publish system is really perverse to me, because it creates incentives for journals to take research for the money (the proliferating predatory open access journals illustrate this conflict of interest perfectly) and says a lot about the current value of scientific research. What it really suggests is that there's more of a demand to publish a document then there is demand for the document itself.
Academics advocating for pay-to-publish should really be asking themselves "what does it mean when there's more of a demand to publish a paper than to read it?" Who is the user of the product? It should be the reader, but now it's really the producer. It's a canary in a coal mine, and the publishing industry is only a small part of what that canary signifies.
The real culprit is lack of job security in the academic sector, including oversupply of equally skilled graduates, decreased availability of secure positions, and lack of tenure.
But the publishers do not decide what's worth to see. The editors and reviewers do this job. So no, the publishers do not contribute much and we (scientists) are indeed in the progress in cutting them out. The reason why it takes so long is simply momentum: The journals with high reputation get to pick the good submissions because it is important for (especially young) scientists to publish in journals with high reputation. The journals with high reputation are most of the time old journals which are published by evil publishers which try to sell access for insane fees to university libraries (which cannot afford to drop subscriptions to high reputation journals). But things are changing...
Civil disobedience doesn't somehow become morally wrong because you don't want to go to trial, "face the music", or allow yourself to be arrested.
Or, to put it another way, allowing the government to immediately silence anything further you have to say after your act of disobedience is unlikely to aid your cause.
.: Semper Absurda
Violating a contract isn't a violation of the NAP.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
the professional societies - IEEE, etc.
Many of them are just as bad as the publishers. IEEE journals are closed access and require copyright assignment. The bottom line is that there is an immense cost to scientific progress because of literature access restrictions. They need to be abolished.
Personally, I am a scientist who has worked at under-resourced US institutions, and lack of journal access routinely causes weeks of delays while waiting for inter-library loan to come through. While many folks who work at tier-1 schools and corporations are in favor of open access, they generally don't understand the depth and urgency of the closed-access problem as it impacts second tier US and international, especially developing world, institutions.
.: Semper Absurda
your crappily formatted manuscript is turned into something that's actually pleasant to look at, and is edited for typos and poor writing is smoothed out. Journals also provide editorial system support, which is ridiculously important (and obvious to anyone who's edited a journal) and indexing, dois, citation format support, etc.
The point sounds sensible - but it's actually largely false. With a few notable exceptions, the journals no longer provide any significant copy editing, and in my experience are constantly introducing textual and formatting errors which require subsequent correction by authors.
The indexes people actually use are external or unrelated to particular journals, like Scholar and ISI. Citations are handled extremely well by software plus trivial proofreading by authors. 'Editorial system support' isn't much more than coordinating reviews via email. None of this requires massive corporations predicated on information-restricting business models.
.: Semper Absurda
This thread is a series of "I'm not sure why you brought up..." and it basically means the old "your analogy is flawed" or "this has nothing to do with the present case".
I got one of these myself yesterday.
Basically, people have an agenda and whatever we feel is abominable, they started out to or were paid to defend. They have kinky morals -- heck, some will even complain moral has nothing to do with anything.
Everybody who took a stand against government is a coward for them, government must do this and that and must stay out of the way of big enterprises, which can piss on everyone, because capitalism.
In the end, we are to be blamed, for we choose the paid distribution. And the paid distribution chooses who it will distribute to, based on odd criteria (like who has money).
If we want knowledge to be free, I guess we'll have to do in some other way, just like the GPL forces source code to be freely obtainable.
Arguing with idiots will only make us like them.
Every brand of pen has its own in house designed mechanism for the clicker.
I'm sure they are all very glad that they spent thousands of dollars on patents so other companies would reinvent the clicker instead of paying a cent in royalties.
If you make clicky pens and you sell less than a million a year ($0.10*1M=$100k), you are not a viable business. Given that and your "cent" royalty:
$0.01/pen * 1,000,000 = $10,000.00, not counting any license compliance costs, accounting, etc.
So paying $10k to reinvent the clicker wheel is absolutely worthwhile. Even $100k or $1M might be worthwhile. The simplest choice of course is to find an expired patent and just use that mechanism. Pez dispensers for example are old enough to be out of patent...
Note I said "worthwhile" not "not absurd" or "not at all a drain on our economy vs no patents in the cited example, like billions of others"
I do. Among other things, I am associated with the publishing industry and have put quite a bit of thought into the matter from that perspective.
In this kind of case, which is publishing and dissemination of the results of scientific research, if that dissemination is intended to be done without charge, then the answer is trivial: Put it on a website and let the world see it. Put your credentials on the website and let fly.
If it isn't intended to be free of charge, then pay what is asked or move on without the work product, whatever it is. Of course, if the research was paid for by the public -- IOW taxes -- then as far as I'm concerned, the public already owns it. That's pretty straightforward no matter how you look at it. For where would the authority over such research product come from? From the public. Because that's what (in the US, can't speak for other countries) government is supposed to be: an arm of the public.
In the case of art and software, I would like to see a public funding mechanism that incorporates the idea of basic income for everyone, and rewards proportionate to readership / userbase / other appropriate measure of valued incorporation into the social matrix. I think we're going to hit something along the lines of basic income sooner than most think (due to actual independent artificial intelligence, along with not intelligent, but rather very clever software agents working on our behalf), and then we'll be in the interesting position of being able to make a different decision with regard to what to do about/with creatives, because no one will be starving -- that simply won't fly as an argument. You want to make PD or some other form of freeware your whole life, hair on you, you can -- and I am sure some people will.
Right now, inasmuch as we're not there yet, things are not only commercial, they are very commercial, and there seem to be two significant problems, one at each end of the issue. At the top, there is congress, which is pretty much in the pocket of anyone who has money in that pocket and is willing to spread it around. This has led to what I consider absurd copyright lengths, no protection whatsoever from predation at the agent / publisher level for artists without great power and at least a modicum of foresight, and draconian penalties for tiny violations of the Mandates From Above.
At the bottom, there is this ridiculous "information wants to be free" meme, which I see as the product of too much pressure on the buyer, price-wise, and not enough education as to the fact that artists and other IP creators actually have to, you know, eat and stuff. And for those that don't earn squat during the creative process, those earnings may actually have to come from the dissemination of the IP itself when / if it reaches a marketable state. That "information wants to be free" meme needs to be countered wherever it raises its disingenuous little head. Not only because it is stupidly wrong, but because it is actually toxic to a significant portion of the creative process. While that is being done, we need to push congress to nudge this situation back into reasonable boundaries.
And therein lies the real problem, as I see it. We've lost control of congress. So that means, I think, that we're going to have to wait for social change that inevitably goes around congress itself. I don't want that to come at the expense of a bunch of creatives getting shafted (certainly not any more than they already are, either.) But AI and clever software... I honestly think that's going to do what the voters refuse to do, and that is put congress into a position where they have absolutely no choice in the matter.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In my field
Those are the key words - it's _your_ field not the journals'. The journals are beholden to us scientists far more than we are to them. We have an advantage in particle physics since we have to self-organize into large groups in order to do our research and these groups had significant bargaining power since one experiment represents a lot of papers and labs like CERN can represent multiple large experiments which can really drive costs down.
However there is nothing to stop that happening in other fields. Get a group of influential researchers to agree to publish in a particular journal if they drop their open access fees and see if you can't get a better deal, especially from some of the lower ranked journals who, if you have enough big names, will see their ranking increase considerably both from the papers and from the publicity.
The way things are going though this might be a short lived. I personally think we will end up with a refereed, online repository along the lines of arXiv eventually. We already provide free reviews for the paid journals and the expense of publishing now online is vastly less than it was in the days of paper so the print journals no longer have a compelling raison d'etre and are currently existing just on cultural inertia.
has to be the stupidest slogan of all time
information doesn't want anything
by 2nd law, it costs something to produce, analyze, store, organize and deliver information
what the slogan means is I, the speaker, want something that cost someone else money, but I don't want to pay for it, and I don't have the guts to say I want it for free, so I am hiding behind this slogan, where an abstract idea (information) takes my place
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The Twitter thing is just a new way to bypass journal restrictions. It has been going on like this for years -
1. It is perfectly accepted by journals that scientists share their own paper, under 'fair-use' regulations. Simply dropping a line to original authors will usually get you their paper without any cloak and dagger tactics.
2. Sites like Libgen have an expanding archive of papers. Running the site is illegal, but downloading material from Libgen isn't (at least in Europe).
3. Posting on the r/scholar sub-reddit will also usually get you the paper within a few hours.
4. A friend/colleague/collaborator at an institution with access to the journal will usually gladly forward you the paper.
5. Many smaller institutions maintain collaboratory VPN access to larger institutions. This allows you to piggyback on their subscription.
If these scientists using regular unencrypted email, it is hardly private. However, the reason the journals will never come after individual scientist is that scientists are their content generators. Any journal suing a scientist will immediately be boycotted and will go out of business. Instead, journals try to make it harder to download papers, while letting scientists read them if they have a subscription (eg: Readcube). Of course, this is a fool's errand.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
To get a copy of a paper, all you need to do is contact the author, as scholars have done for centuries. Arriving at my first academic job more than 30 years ago, the first thing I found my desk was preprinted stationary with the message "Dear Dr ___, please send me a copy of your paper ___ which appeared in ___". I still have a cupboard full of journal article offprints to send away in response to such requests. Of course, email and PDF make the old ways redundant. In the past, journal publishers typically gave you 50 offprints for free to send to correspondents. Now, my favourite publisher gives me a PDF of the article exactly as they have published it, again for free. While I am not supposed to publish it online, I can send it to anybody I please. The solution to open access issues should involve making sure that this time-honoured mechanism continues to work, and certainly should not include requiring authors to pay for the right to publish their articles. Unfortunately, this iniquitous policy is on the increase, and some people are even happy to see it.
To make an analogy, duh.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
[Citation Needed]
There you go.
Clearly, researchers that go against the system do not do so to spite publishers, but to help others in need of papers they can't afford. Why does it bother publishers so much to lose sales that they wouldn't have made anyway ? No money was lost, and more ideas were shared. It doesn't seem to me like anyone got hurt or even prejudiced, so it doesn't make sense to bring the law into it.
Want to set yourself up for a phishing attack? Just tweet your email address and your interest area. Someone will surely send you a PDF that isn't laced with malicious code.
Troll
Well, duh. The gain, on the part of the information creators, is exactly the same when the papers are circulated by the 'publisher' and when they are circulated by the 'pirate'. The same gain in prestige due to 'pirate' copies also accrues to the 'publisher', which is the referred-to source in any subsequent citations of that original work.
The pre-modern situation was that any academic paper was available outside of library journal collections, by sending a postcard to the authors, asking for a reprint. Those reprints were available for the cost of a few stamps, and the publisher would typically start the author off with a few dozen paper copies. I've mailed out many such, and requested some (but not many: I had a good university's tech library).
Every working research lab maintains a collection of relevant papers, there's no other way to get new researchers up to speed. Building a PDF collection, though, requires either piracy, or workarounds (my draft before editing is NOT the work the 'publisher' can protect), or a budget in the dozens-of-dollars-per-page combined with an e-library digital rights management scheme.
Piracy is winning (and workarounds are going to win if the publishers push too hard).
Workarounds winning, would kill Elsevier's profits as surely as piracy.
I'm not sure why you brought up Snowden, he was not part of this discussion up to this point. We were talking about Swartz, who in now way was exposing any kind of government spying or great injustice.
you don't understand how snowden relates to civil disobedience?