Napster for Researchers

At Vox.com: Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the researcher who's breaking the law to make science free for all - Vox

As some may know, accessing academic journals' contents is difficult and often costly if you don't have access to electronic libraries. (Typically, university students do, as well as employees of some organizations and corporations.) The article above describes an effort to make the content available for all at no cost.

I'm generally for protecting copyrights and intellectual property, but I've never understood who is served by such limited access to academic journals...except the subscription services. Certainly not the authors, who are not paid for their contributions. The public isn't served either. Nor are the journals themselves, who are (generally) not-for-profit and aren't exactly cash cows.

The subscription services get paid for providing (electronically and in paper form) journals through university libraries (and others) to readers. They don't produce the intellectual property; they just profit from it.

If this website was taking money out of the pockets of the people who did the real work AND those works were available at a reasonable cost, then I'd be for copyright protection here. But I believe all of this should remain copyrighted by the original authors AND be made generally available. That way, you could access the works for little or no cost, but the authorship would remain with the original researchers. In other words, I hope she remains successful long enough to, like Napster, eventually shift the paradigm permanently.

What does this mean to DL students? Well, it's hard to go through the "stacks" at a university library when that library is hundreds or thousands of miles away. And even if you do have access via your school, you don't have access to everything. Doing a degree at a UK school meant their library didn't subscribe to a lot of journals in the U.S., for example. Fortunately, I had access to three others here in the U.S., but not everyone enjoys that advantage.

Free it up and find a way to kick a little cash back to the authors! We'll call it "Researchify.com" and stream knowledge everywhere for a low monthly subscription. C'mon, Google Scholar, you can do this!

 

Bump. Maybe this isn't interesting to readers, but I think it has a significant promise for doctoral researchers and for the broader area of academe.

 

I am torn.

There are several papers I would love to read, but cannot because they are locked in a pay vault. My schools will not/cannot pay for it, and I definitely cannot.

I understand her reasoning, but cannot accept criminal behavior.

I do not believe this is something that requires civil disobedience.

There are alternate ways to achieve her goal.

 

Out of curiosity, what would be an alternative?

 

Ditto. What are the alternatives?

BTW, universities pay dearly for access to these electronic collections, and those subscription charges are based on the size of the population permitted to access them. So universities almost never grant access to non-members of their communities, even for a fee. Often, universities will even cut off their graduates. Not nice, but fiscally necessary.

 

What this professor and others don't seem to comprehend is there's more that goes into publishing research than just writing a paper and posting it somewhere. It has to be peer reviewed, for one thing, and without publishers who is going to do that? Are you going to leave that up to professors and researchers to police that themselves? I would hope not.

 

There are several groups that have signed various petitions to not contribute their papers to closed systems.

For example, "The Cost of Knowledge".

The way to undermine the closed structure as an author is by pledging not to submit a paper, referee, or join an editorial board for a closed journal. In similar vain there exist the "Research Without Walls", and "Open Access Pledge".

An other way is to petition the government to make citizen paid-for research public. This is in the works in the US already (PDF)).

Finally the expansion of Open Access Journals, and holding such journals to high, maybe even higher standards than the commercial ones would be a serious blow to closed systems.

Much of the "open access" publishing opportunities from the large closed publishers came about, in my opinion because of the pressures experienced through the above.


Ms. Alexandra Elbakyan may not be able to get her hands on immediate data, true. But, even her immediate needs could have been satisfied legally. She could have contacted the authors directly. I am not aware of Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, or Informa restricting this.

Hope this helps.

 

For her purposes, which are macro and grand, that would be tens of millions of requests. It wouldn't work on an individual level, either. (Not much, anyway.) For my thesis with Leicester, I had 37pages of references. Those were just the ones I used. I reviewed more than 1,000 articles in the process. I simply cannot imagine doing that without unfettered access to electronic libraries on both sides of the pond.

Generally, I'm not in favor of breaking the law. Specifically, I'm not usually in favor of violating copyrights. But this situation is ridiculous and only impairs a central tenet of advancing knowledge: that we build upon the works of others.

Another problem with the aggressive firewall is that it diminishes the utility of the science hiding behind it. Being a scholar-practitioner, I would contend that a major restriction to the applied use of academic research is that practitioners simply never see it! Sure, there would be other barriers to overcome, like making the case for its relevance to practice. But we can't even get to that dilemma when publishers do their best to keep this all a secret!

 

I have my share of papers to write, so I am familiar with the burden.

But, I can rarely tolerate consequentialism and in this case there is no reason to compromise my ethics.

 

Okay, had to look that one up.

What you seem to be ignoring--not "missing" because I'm sure you get these things--is that she's not doing this to give people access to pieces of research. She's doing this to make all of this research available to everyone.

You, individually, can choose to do whatever you want. It's not about you.

 

You believe that her motives are altruistic? Her primary motive is not about herself, her friends, colleagues gaining free access to research?

 

If it was just about herself and a few friends she wouldn't have to create a website accessible to everyone, right?

 

I am not a sociologist or psychologist, but I would venture to say the "website accessible to everyone" is an attempt to mitigate her own (and potentially others') recognition of the ethical conundrum.

Making it available to everyone is minor, once the number of people looking for the information reaches enough "few friends". Maybe a dozen? Half dozen? Who wants to keep making a set of DVDs over and over again?

 

Oh no, now you've done it Steve. Now you've shown yourself to be one of them.:scared1:

 

Generally speaking, yes. I am fairly familiar with the culture where she is.

I would probably concede your point if she was from areas I am not familiar with.

 

A follow-up to this
In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-hub

 

But all these people are really just doing all this for the benefit of themselves and their close friends, right?:no1: