Meet the woman who put 50 million stolen articles online so you can read them for free
Meet the woman who put 50 million stolen articles online so you can read them for free
It's a serious challenge to a $10 billion-a-year industry
You see, the problem, publishers, is that your "business" should not have been a business in the first place.
"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.
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.
Also I have met people who have published some pretty important papers, most of them use scihub on a weekly basis, and none of them care that their papers get "stolen". And they all have some strong opinions about Elsevier.
These articles were stolen, by the paywall operators. Elbakyan rescued them from the thieves. 🎉
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.
“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.
“It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”
Well, I'm convinced!
Refuses to elaborate
Sues
‘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?
No give, only take!!!
Yeah lmao, that's the worst possible argument he could give I think
"Have you forgotten your economics class?" And then compared public research to a private newspaper
Like, lmao
Elbakyan is an immeasurably more virtuous, noble and honorable person than these Dylla and Greco worms.
"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!"
That can't sounds like won't
I could almost sympathize when it came to paper publishing. Because the cost to publish was high, and not a lot of people buying. But now with electronic formats, yeah, they are total assholes in the current sense.
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.
Fr. After I graduated I was cut off from access to scientific literature, which is a major blow when trying to keep up in ones field.
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!
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. :)
Thanks for sharing!
articles aren't - and cannot be - stolen; articles are meant to be read.
You can steal potential profits.
Stealing profits that are already made by stealing? Yeah, I have no sympathy for that.
Tax payers already pay for this shit through federal funding of the sciences, just for the publishers to turn around and steal people's time and money to view and peer review them. Publishers are thieves, so they can go fuck themselves.
information isn't profit
"Stolen"...where did the originals go?
Directly to zlibrary
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!
Yep, before sci hub you could always just email an author and probably get the paper that way, they aren't the ones profiting.
While it's true that publishers do something of value, the amount they charge is absurd.
What makes it even worse is that so many of the people involved are donating their labour. It reminds me of college sports in the US. The actual people doing the work, the athletes, are forced to do it for free. Meanwhile, a few select groups: coaches, TV networks, etc. are making huge amounts of money.
Yeah, I have no problem with people being compensated for their work.
The problem is that the discussion usually ends at "compensation" and never includes "how much?" Useful idiots believe that whatever price is charged is always fair and necessary, which is sad.
In a system literally built around the amount of money we have, we sure do like to believe that magnitude doesn't matter.
Alexandra is the hero students (and scientists) all over the world need! And I'm so glad that my former profs acknowledged and recommended Sci-Hub to us. So many people wouldn't be able to graduate without debt (or "even more debt" for the Americans) otherwise.
That's fucking great that your profs even recommended it!
When my wife was getting her masters degree, her professor told her about it too lol. All of her professors pretty much used it. When I myself, tried to tell her about sci-hub and libgen, I was surprised that she was already well acquainted
Still insane to me that one woman literally saves the world of science from all this corruption
Perhaps not saved, but I'd venture the most significant nail in the coffin of the scientific publishing mafia so far, pursued with integrity and honor. The rise of open publishing that followed is very telling, and in my mind directly attributable to Alexandra's work and it's popularity, they know they need to adapt or (probably and) die.
Still need to work on the publish or perish mentality, getting negative results published, and getting corporate propaganda out of the mix, to name a few.
And she still doing it. And still pretty much alone in doing it.
Is that the Anna from Anna's archive?
/s
Filling in Aaron Swartz footsteps
Hopefully not all the way...
Following in Aaron Swartz's footsteps.
Hopefully she doesn't get treated the way he did.
I get so pissed when I think about Aaron Swartz. He was a bit before his time. I'd love it if here were still around. There would be so much more people rallying behind him these current times.
I was telling a friend about him the other day. She said she found it odd how it seems like he became a martyr for his ideals, in that the way that he is remembered is almost like he's a mythological figure, more ideal than man. I agreed with her that the loss of humanity due to such a high profile death is tragic, but that it wasn't the internet who turned him into a martyr, but the FBI (and whoever else was pushing for his prosecution).
They threw the book at Aaron Schwartz because they wanted to set a precedent. They wanted to turn him into a symbol, and that led to his death. I'm proud of how the internet rallied around him and made him into a different kind of symbol, but like you, I feel sad to think about what could have been if he hadn't been killed (I know that he died by suicide, but saying that he "died" felt too passive). It sucks that he's just a part of history now.
Mad respect.
hero
Agreed
At first glance I thought, "so that's what Anna looks like."
I'm gonna look up Anna info next. I don't know anything about her either.
So she is the real Trinity character.
Kudos for being publicly visible and not getting disappeared by the copyright mafia.
I know a little about what it's like to have people constantly try to remove me from places. At least in the electronic sense. Lemmy has a hate-erection for me, like no other. lol
Now that I experience hate and censorship daily, I have so much more sympathy for people like her.
And she has to deal with it in the real world. I don't. Very easy for me to laugh it off.
But that chick has to deal with relocating, lawsuits, hackers, etc. She's my total hero now. So fucking cool.
What would Jesus do?
She also has a very funny article about how Stalin is a God of Science