Comments on: Downloading Pirated Science

By: internets

internets — Sat, 17 May 2008 18:07:28 +0000

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.

By: Joe Infla

Joe Infla — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:03:31 +0000

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.

By: fishbwoy

fishbwoy — Sat, 17 May 2008 07:23:37 +0000

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.

By: L. Shane Carlson

L. Shane Carlson — Sat, 17 May 2008 05:37:12 +0000

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

By: John Doe

John Doe — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:24:20 +0000

textbooktorrents.com

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:15:54 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:24:55 +0000

There is a reason Arxiv is free.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:57:04 +0000

Let’s find an industrial scanner and go to town.

By: Lbug

Lbug — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:21:36 +0000

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.

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:11:08 +0000

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.