“stolen” is such an exaggerated misrepresentation…news organizations should really do better. When you steal something from someone, the owner loses access to it. She just liberated public research.
When a regular person makes something available that shouldnt be behind a paywall to begin with it’s stealing. When a billionaire or company uses ai to gather data from paid sources or just straight out plagiarises it’s just maximising profits.
Hey hey hey, hold on just a second. It’s not called “maximizing profits”, we don’t do that! It’s called ✨innovation✨
This is why I hate the recent trend where people are saying “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
“Piracy”, or more accurately “copyright infringement” was never stealing. What you’re doing is violating the government-granted monopoly on copying something. That’s so different from stealing.
I totally agree that she just liberated it. But since many lawsuits said she was “stealing” from them, and people who don’t know the details at first glance may think that too. So I think the headline is correct in a news sense. And the article is very accurate and favorable of her.
I realize this is an older article from 2016. But it’s just so good, I had to share it in case some here aren’t familiar with her. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan and she’s the person behind Sci-Hub, a library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers’ paywalls in various ways.
And she’s my personal hero. :)
“People often say to me, ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers. You hardly print anymore. The Web is free. Why do you charge?’” said H. Frederick Dylla, the former director of the American Institute of Physics and board member of the Association of American Publishers. “It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”
Albert Greco, a publishing expert at Fordham University who is working on a book about scholarly publishing, said those making that argument are forgetting everything they learned or should have learned in economics class.
“There are costs,” he said. “Does The Washington Post have a paywall?”
Yes.
“So is it fair then if some high-school student wants to really follow the Supreme Court and doesn’t have the money to pay?” Greco said. “Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”
These assholes don’t even have a better reason for fleecing everyone than base greed, and they don’t try to hide it.
The existence of publishers for scientific literature is completely unnecessary in the modern era. They exist only to make profits to continue their existence. They don’t actually provide value anymore when research institutions can just conduct peer review and then let researchers self-publish.
They create negative value (a bottleneck) by limiting who can access research for just… aggregating and hosting articles.
wouldn’t it be funny if I slapped in a few ssds into an old desktop I found on the side of the road and hosted the entirety of human knowledge from it
‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers.
We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.
Instead, he just takes everything from authors and reviewers for free. Is he living in a different country?
“It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”
Well, I’m convinced!
“Does this for profit news agency require money for information? Then surely academic research needs to require money to get the info as well! Nevermind that public funds are involved with a lot of research initially where news orgs don’t have that, we need to make a profit cuz reasons!”
Stolen papers. Absolutely. Stolen by corporations.
I wrote one of those papers. The fuckers charged me $1000 to publish it as open access, then other journals download it and stick it on their websites and charge $60 to read it. What a joke!
Ignorant person checking in with probably a dumb and oversimplified question, but what prevents you and other science researchers from posting your writing independently? Why must you submit to these corpo controlled publications?
As someone in science that has used this many times, I can’t emphasize enough how much this has accelerated research in the modern era. I am so grateful for her work.
A huge aspect of this also is that it disproportionately benefits academics and students in parts of the world where there is less institutional access to journal subscriptions. That is to say that SciHub has been a significant force for democratising knowledge and countering historic inequities.
Yep, I just found out about it recently because I was doing research on a project. I had heard, but never explored or looked into, sci-hub. I had no idea about it. I don’t know how I missed it all of these years!
Sadly no longer updated but I think libgen and some other services are filling the gaps.
