Downloading Pirated Science
May 16th, 2008
PirateBay is the Paris Hilton of anti-copyright organizations. Somehow, mainly due to the lenient copyright laws, they are still serving up the hottest uncensored videos even after a constant barrage of publicity. Well, to be more precise, PirateBay doesn't actually serve up any copyrighted material they simply host and track torrent files.
Torrent files are instructions to find other people on the internet with the latest Radiohead album (bad example) that you want to download. A torrent application of your choice assembles chunks of the files you get from others and simultaneously sends those chunks to others in the same boat as you. Before you know it you have "the gentlest, prettiest Radiohead set yet" (Entertainment Weekly).
It's hard not to weep a little for the directors, producers, musicians, actors, and technicians which I am indirectly stealing from but I reverse-weep when I think of the percentage of money that goes to said individuals when I purchase a CD or DVD. So, I go back to weeping, but with joy, as I witness Cloverfield in the theatre and The Roots live in concert.
However, the real question is, who would I be weeping for if I could download scientific literature on a site like PirateBay without having to pay expensive journal subscription fees (subscription required) that Universities are required to pay?
I might weep for the niche journal publishers and some peer reviewers for a little while, but my tears would instantly evaporate at the thought of the greater good. It's no question that the merits of open-access science are hotly debated but who actually stopped to consider a business model for downloading TV shows on the internet before just doing it?
It's called piracy! It's not really a complicated thing. What you do is go ahead and download using your new and innovative distribution method like Torrents and 12 months later companies realize this and adapt in order to stay in business. They advertise online, they sell shows on iTunes, they stream shows with commercials on their websites, ...whatever! The same should be true with scientific publishing.
This idea was already started by Joanna Karczmarek in like 2005. With permission from Arxiv, she grouped up entire categories of Arxiv as torrent files and hosted them at UBC. Of course, Arxiv is free to begin with but the concept is the same.
Having a local copy of all high energy theoretical physics papers (a mere 9GB at Arxiv) would be mind boggling for a researcher in that field. One could research entirely offline, free from any institution, with search speeds as fast as ones hard drive could read. Journal subscriptions could be automatically synchronized to a local copy and scientists across the world could all be on the same page (an electronic page).
So, with Arxiv already dealt with, one has only a few more journals left to go! Of course, you'd want to specify what journals are relevant to your field, but I'm estimating that all of Nature in PDFs will be 143GB (20mb per issue with 7193 issues). Similarly, I expect Science will be 117GB (20mb per issue with 5878 issues). With disk space costing about $200 for a single 1000GB drive this isn't so unreasonable.
Of course, there are minor technicalities in obtaining 100's of gigabytes of science papers, but putting that aside, pirating science is entirely PloSable. It may be just the shady underhanded approach to open-access science that people are looking for.
Thank goodness for Sweden!
Edit: Lots of great comments on this article at http://reddit.com/r/science/info/6jmij/comments/
May 16th, 2008 at 10:11 am
Don't forget that many journals are published to pay for the activities of scientific societies. If you appreciate the things they do for members, the meetings they put on, then that should factor into your decision whether to pirate or not. Elsevier is not going to go out of business if someone torrents one of their journals, but a small scientific society for a niche community might not be able to withstand the revenue loss. CSHL Press is part of a not-for-profit research institute, so any journal subscription revenue we take in goes directly to fund research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. So the researchers there are the ones you'd be affecting.
Ideally someone will figure out how to make open access journal publishing a viable business model and questions like this will become moot. Until then, just remember that not all publishing houses are owned by large corporations.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Amen, David Crotty. Journal proceeds also fund the admin staff required to oversee peer review. While this is a less labor-intensive task now that online submission and review is humming, there's still the cost of paying someone like HighWire to host.
And having published in decent peer-reviewed journals is likely to continue to be a requirement for advancement in academia.
So who pays? The academics? Out of their own pockets? AFAIK, most grants can't be used to pay page charges.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Let's find an industrial scanner and go to town.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
There is a reason Arxiv is free.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Journals is a nice touch, but how about Textbooks? They are a total ripoff.
Why does an author need to make a 7th edition of his Algebra textbook? Algebra doesn't change. However, when there are too many used copies
of a textbook available, the publisher's are not making money. So they essentially bribe the professors to move up to the new edition by giving them their books for free, (along with what else?) Then every student has to cough up for the new edition. Some books are hundreds of dollars. It is a scam! The publishers have a captive audience and they know it.
Forget downloading music or movies. Start scanning textbooks and creating torrents of them. There is a real need!
*My wife worked in a mall bookstore while in college. The college essentially had two majors: Teaching and Nursing. The Nuns that taught the Education program ran a real working elementary school to train student teachers in. The Nuns couldn't afford the workbooks for the kids, so they were photocopying the pages for the kids to use. The Publisher was unwilling to come down on the price or make a deal with them.
My wife found 20 copies of that workbook used as packing material for a case of romance novels. The publisher "couldn't" afford to give the school a discount, but they could afford to use the same books as packing material. Its criminal.
May 16th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
textbooktorrents.com
May 17th, 2008 at 1:37 am
This is a great topic that I and some partners are trying to tackle presently. We have created a social networking site for academics and researchers and are coupling it with a open source repository. We have an online journal already being used by the Idaho State Historical Society for their companion publication Idaho Yesterdays and are scanning in the back issues to make them available gratis. Journals are a grotesque scam and are designed to remove the rights of the originators and put money in the pocket of the publishers. This coupled with walling off access to data results in a slow and terrible process. Everything we do is licensed under a Creative Commons licensing agreement. We are trying to build a mechanism that allows members to share content and create textbooks that their students can download for free; we hope to have this out soon as an iteration of the journal system. Check it out, http://www.pronetos.com
May 17th, 2008 at 3:23 am
I sit on the council of a learned society here in the UK, and the profits from our mid-impact factor journal largely go to pay for PhD studentships. If we go to open access where does the money come from.
If you want a recently published paper, email the author - you will typically get a response in a few hours.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Even if I had all the articles from several journals in my field stored on my hard drive, it wouldn't be sufficient. For me, it's all about the metadata, and that's what structured search provides that I can't replicate. Why? First, older articles are mere images of pages without text attached. Second, a search site lets me look for keywords only in the abstract or title, and look for author names among the actual authors, rather than among those cited by the authors in-text. Compared to an online academic search archive, Spotlight or google desktop search just can't compare.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Copyright protects the advancement of science in an economic environment restricted to market ideology.
Ergo, it makes sense that those who benefit economically from the information should want to pay big bucks for early access to it. However, pretty much anything more than a few months old might as well be available for perusal in the commons for the benefit of all students and the laity of those disciplines.
Also, what's with updated English literature textbooks? How often does Hamlet get updated? Thank goodness for those profs who make everything available digitally.
December 13th, 2009 at 2:46 am
LOL @ second comment