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Sci-Hub Faces $4.8 Million Piracy Damages and ISP Blocking (torrentfreak.com)
The American Chemical Society (ACS), a leading source of academic publications in the field of chemistry, accused Sci-Hub of mass copyright infringement and is demanding $4.8 million in piracy damages. "Sci-Hub was made aware of the legal proceedings but did not appear in court," reports Torrent Freak. "As a result, a default was entered against the site, and a few days ago ACS specified its demands, which include $4.8 million in piracy damages." The complaint comes soon after the pirate site was ordered to pay $15 million in piracy damages to academic publisher Elsevier. From the report: "Here, ACS seeks a judgment against Sci-Hub in the amount of $4,800,000 -- which is based on infringement of a representative sample of publications containing the ACS Copyrighted Works multiplied by the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each publication," they write. "Sci-Hub's unabashed flouting of U.S. Copyright laws merits a strong deterrent. This Court has awarded a copyright holder maximum statutory damages where the defendant's actions were "clearly willful' and maximum damages were necessary to 'deter similar actors in the future.'" The publisher notes that the maximum statutory damages are only requested for 32 of its 9,000 registered works. This still adds up to a significant sum of money, of course, but that is needed as a deterrent, ACS claims.
Although the deterrent effect may sound plausible in most cases, another $4.8 million in debt is unlikely to worry Sci-Hub's owner, as she can't pay it off anyway. However, there's also a broad injunction on the table that may be more of a concern. The requested injunction prohibits Sci-Hub's owner to continue her work on the site. In addition, it also bars a wide range of other service providers from assisting others to access it. Specifically, it restrains "any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, to cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendant Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to [ACS's works]."
Although the deterrent effect may sound plausible in most cases, another $4.8 million in debt is unlikely to worry Sci-Hub's owner, as she can't pay it off anyway. However, there's also a broad injunction on the table that may be more of a concern. The requested injunction prohibits Sci-Hub's owner to continue her work on the site. In addition, it also bars a wide range of other service providers from assisting others to access it. Specifically, it restrains "any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, to cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendant Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to [ACS's works]."
Its not the creators and discoverers that are suing. Its the rent-seeking journal.
"His name was James Damore."
Agreed! Speaking as a scientist I would love to see this kind of change. If it's paid for by tax dollars the results should be free and open. More open access to scientific literature will drive more innovation and profit in the private sector and simplify and improve access in the academic world. It's not uncommon to simply ignore a paper that might be relevant to your work simply because it's behind a pay-walled service for which the university does not have a contract.
And Streisand's themselves as the anti-humanity ghouls that they are.
Requiem for the American Dream
The published scientists are the enablers of this enterprise. It's time for them to make a stand and to publish only in open-access journals. I, myself, published a paper in an Elsevier journal four decades ago, long before the Internet, but I would never do this today.
I think the "logic" is that they own it as they had some "experts" check it(for a cheque)..
Most journal reviewers don't get paid for their work. They own it because you cede the copyright.
In fact, the writer pays for the curation, editing process and reputation of the publisher.
As part of a scientific conference I run, I act as a publisher for the proceedings. I can assure you that the cost of publishing is absolutely NOT "basically nothing".
Well as part of the scientific conference I run, I acted as publisher for the proceedings and we did it all online for nothing but the organizational effort via arXiv. So yes it can be done for that price if you do it online. Besides who on earth wants printed copies of proceedings today? I think I've only ever looked things up in proceedings about twice and at least in my field, almost no conferences bother with them anymore (we don't now) because all the talk slides are online through the conference website so there really is no need for them. Just wait for the actual paper.
I think you meant to say "I'm sure that the court action in a US court will have a huge effect on that Kazakhstan site, hosted in Kazakhstan, made by a Kazakhstan woman."
But the value that a publisher brings to bear is (a) mangement of the peer-review process,
They don't really manage it - that's done by editors who are usually academics too.
(b) a proper typesetting and consistent format --- and believe me, even if you provide incredibly rigid and explicit instructions, people figure out how to screw it up a dozen ways from Sunday,
This is not needed for online publication. You do not have to have lots of rigid rules and the ones you do have can be enforced automatically.
(c) a reputation for publishing only high-quality work, + (d) [which is effectively the same point]
Hence my point that the effort needs to be started by those same academic societies which began the journals in the first place. If physics societies like the IoP or APS put their names to such efforts their reputations will jump start the procedure of acquiring a solid reputation. Ultimately though these things take time to build up - the conference regularly organize has been running for over 30 years and it takes time to build a reputation.
(e) indexing of your article.
This is trivially easy today. Indeed things like ORCID are making it very easy - and free - to unambiguously link researchers and papers.
As part of the scientific community who has published many articles, I can affirm that the above poster is exaggerating at best. Since the age of the word processor, the author does the lions share of the type setting. In fact, I have had articles sent back for revision if the type setting was wrong. So, I am not sure what all these high paid graphics artists are doing.
Now, I have also reviewed hundreds of articles. I guess I really did not get the memo, because I was not paid for a single one. Maybe in the above posters magical journal, they pay reviews, but in my experience it is a service that one has to do gratis, if they want grant money from a federal agency. If I am wrong, i am happy to send a bill
As for the rest of the arguments, all I can say is that circles are circular because they are circles. If one creates a system with an arbitrary number of cost centers at an arbitrary cost, then they can get an arbitrary value for their production fee. For example, many journals are located in DC or New York. While I am sure this is a lot of fun for the editor, it is not necessary. I am pretty sure in a world of interconnected supply chains, one could base in somewhere cheap like West Virginia, pay negligible rent and pay the editor less since it is a cheap place to live. Suddenly, the costs go down.
BTW, the editor's main job is to find reviewers and to see if the article fits the scope of the journal. Despite the title, there is very little editing of typos etc going on from that position. Some journals also have people do this gratis, for the ability to have a better chance to get grants, of course.
To put this in further perspective, the poster claims over $2000 per article. Using an example I know well, the journal of physical chemistry has about 30-40 articles per issue. So, this means each issue is costing 60-80K dollars. In comparison, a comic book has a break even point of about $20,000/issue. These are in full color, based in New York, and they have to pay all their artists and authors. Since a comic book costs about 3 dollars, this means they are doing this for less than the poster's journal, who gets all their material for free. Something doesn't add up.
Did I mention that the authors of the article have to pay to be published? Just saying...
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Paying reviewers is nice. It's also not typically done, and I sincerely doubt it's most of the 2000$ you come up with.
Did you cover the rent/electricity/janitorial stuff of reviewers? Of scientific editors that actually make the decision what to publish?
If not then this fee, with the exception of the honoraria, doesn't go to anyone who is actually contributing something of value to the journal.
You are complaining that it's expensive to hire people that don't add much value. The obvious solution is to not hire them. Scholastica organizes the peer review process for 10$ per article. That's a sensible price. The arxiv's expenses are 1.2 million$ per year for an article submission rate of about 10.000/month, and access to 1.2 million existing articles. So similarly about 10$ per new article. The largest single chunk of that will come from scientific institutions paying a membership fee of between 4.400$ and 1.000$.
What do you think the value added is of the arxiv, vs. two articles in your journal?