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Elsevier Wants $15 Million In 'Piracy' Damages From Sci-Hub and Libgen (torrentfreak.com)
lbalbalba writes: Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers, is demanding $15 million in damages from Sci-Hub and LibGen, who make paywalled scientific research papers freely available to the public [without permission]. A good chunk of these papers are copyrighted, many by Elsevier. Elsevier has requested a default judgment of $15 million against the defendants for their "truly egregious conduct" and "staggering" infringement. Sci-Hub's efforts are backed by many prominent scholars, who argue that tax-funded research should be accessible to everyone. Others counter that the site doesn't necessarily help the "open access" movement move forward. Sci-Hub's founder Alexandra Elbakyan defends her position and believes that what she does is helping millions of less privileged researchers to do their work properly by providing free access to research results.
Death to Elsevier
Funny if Elselvier lose!!
Pretty sure the death will all be in the other direction. Copyright is big business. Big.
If you want it changed, you have to get after legislators, and possibly even the US constitution, presuming your concerns are US-centric.
Low-level violations won't do it, and large scale central violations such as these are pretty much doomed from day one.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'd never heard of this site before but I agree with the goal of SciHub that the results of scientific research, especially that funded by governments, should be freely available to everyone. However, the way to achieve that is by lobbying governments to make it a requirement that all research they fund is published in open access journals (which is now largely the case). Simply breaking the law on a massive scale like this is not likely to end well nor, in the long-term, achieve the aim of making research freely available.
quick! before they get a court order taking the site down somebody write a perl script to take the research papers and automatically publish them on turrentz.eu^W limetorrents^W extratorrents^W torrentfreak^W argh forget it...
While I am all in favor of the defendants, I cannot see how they could win that case.
Traditional scientific journals had their use before internet and effective search engines became widespread.
But now, why do people pay them? What do they bring to the table? Distribution is dirt cheap, search engines make finding relevant publications easy, most editing is done by the researchers themselves and peer-review is not paid. The only service they seem to offer is pass the papers from the original researchers to reviewers, and, based on the review, decide to grant it the honor of being published. Publishing means making it available online with a ludicrous price tag.
And even for scientists, what good does it make being published in a journal that restricts access. I know some researchers who simply don't use paywalled papers. If they find something interesting, they try to work around the paywall (legally) and if they can't, the paper is ignored and therefore not cited.
Well, here are some.
Ezekiel 23:20
From the bottom of my heart: Fuck you!
I am a highly-cited scientist (in my field), but have diligently avoided publishing in, or refereeing articles for (by-rules for-free) any any Elsevier-owned journal – for the entirety of my entire career.
I also go to great pains to avoid citing anything that has appeared in an Elsevier scientific article. Surely the author said something similar somewhere else... or someone else said it...
Elsevier are Copyright-vultures feeding off the free labor and hard work of scientists the world-over.
.. aren't the only people on the internet. Should the entire world (including US's rivals) have access to taxpayer-funded research, when one of your primary competitive advantages is r&d?
I know scientists don't really care much for nationalism (as welll htey shouldn't), but if this is taxpayer-funded research, then it's not entirely up to them.
They want money for 'damages?' Well I want access to the research that MY tax payer dollars payed for. These papers are not being stolen by Sci-Hub, they are being ransomed by the leeches at Elsevier. You can't steal something that is already rightfully belongs to you. These papers rightfully belong to the people. It's completely ridiculous that I or anyone else should have to pay money for a paper three decades old, or pay for something because their institution does not have that particular subscription, or pay for anything else that they already, through their taxes, paid for.
Fuck Elsevier. They are nothing more than a drain on the system. The free sharing of knowledge is one integral to the values of science. If promoting science, and getting what you are paid for, are piracy, then long live scientific piracy.
May your content be pirated freely and without repercussion for all time.
Most journals allow you to post your accepted manuscript on an archive site or your personal website, usually immediately or sometimes after an embargo period of a year. If everyone did this, then it doesn't really matter what journal you publish in, your papers are still freely available to anyone.
Aaron Swartz lost this battle. Hopefully others will prevail.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Don't cite papers that are behind pay walls. Period. If the authors want impact, publicly publish.
Remember, Elsevier is the company that kept getting caught publishing fake journals on behalf of corporations, like pharma corps. They are evil, and must be destroyed. If you publish with Elsevier, you publish with Hitler!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan, by a Kazakh native. Why hasn't the US court declined to hear the case since they clearly do not have jurisdiction.
Without Sci-Hub and Libgen, I literally could not have completed my PhD thesis. My University's system's to access papers was broken, and so time-consuming to use, that it made accessing papers nearly impossible. I'm as anti-piracy as they get, but in this case, Elsevier does not create anything, and adds very little value. As someone who publishers papers, I do not want a company selling them. I am not compensated. My university is not compensated. The editors of the publication are not compensated. There are some a few cases where journals have legitimate expenses. And in this case, those people should be paid. But generally, there are no costs to review and publish academic papers. And it goes against the spirit of science to impose them on readers. As a music producer, the situation is very different—we all want (and need) to be paid for our work—the artists, engineers, producers, record labels—everyone involved in the process of creating and delivering music. But as a scientist, this is bullshit.
I write Wiki articles about historical science topics. Much of this I get from back issues of magazines like Scientific American (which, for the younger in the crowd, used to be pretty serious) and IEEE Spectrum and similar industry magazines, but also a journal article here and there.
The commercial value of these articles is zero. They are invariably about obsolete systems that are no longer used. In fact, many of the articles, like Mauchly's article on computer storage systems, have fallen into the public domain. Yet they remain paywalled.
Without sci-hub I could not produce the quality articles I write. That is bad for society. That loss is far worse than the zero dollars the journals would gain.