The Rise of Pirate Libraries | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of Pirate Libraries

atlasobscura.com

132 pointsfforflo35 comments

Open access is being increasingly thought of as inevitable and the only ethical option for publishing academic research. What I believe we will end up with eventually is a situation where nearly all new publications are open access, and a good deal of older twentieth century (and earlier) research is publicly available as well due to ongoing digitalisation and expired copyrights. In between, there will be a significant body of research kept locked away behind paywalls by publishers trying to hold on to those cash cows and the inertia copyright on a work has once granted.

At the same time, 'piracy' on a massive scale (like Sci-Hub) will only get easier due to technological advances and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to consumers worldwide. Combine that with an utter lack of sympathy for (academic) paywalls and publishers, and a widespread believe that sharing these works is ethically just, and you have a situation that simply cannot be contained.

I expect that in twenty years time you will be able to download almost the complete library of published academic works from the twentieth and twenty first centuries in the time it takes to make a pot of coffee — legally or illegally.

So publishers will have to learn to deal with this new reality and reinvent themselves in an open access world, or perish.

Journal publishing itself is awkward. It's bad use of experimental data - often you have to look at printed graphs to figure out data values not reported in the paper. Statistic power is almost never mentioned. Tons of data that could be useful to other researchers is discarded. Discussion sections tend to be overly biased. There is so much research output, it's almost impossible to refute anything and possibel to support almost anything. And so on and so on. What we need is accurate databases of research results, not more publishing.

We should be rewarding scientists for the volume, integrity and significance of their data output, not for what they claim themselves in their papers.

Not all science is statistics. That's just the current paradigm and not applicable in all cases. I agree the reward system is flawed, but it ain't so easy to improve it.

> I expect that in twenty years time you will be able to download almost the complete library of published academic works from the twentieth and twenty first centuries in the time it takes to make a pot of coffee — legally or illegally.

I hope and suspect it won't take twenty years. Academic journals are an anachronism and moreover an unethical anachronism.

Closed access academic journals were an unethical anachronism twenty years ago. And yet we've made little progress against them.

will only get easier due to technological advances and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to consumers worldwide.

Not if some of those "technological advances" are acting against this movement:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

I thought it was interesting that in 1997 RMS said:

> free kernels, even entire free operating systems...had existed around the turn of the century...you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password

Sounds a lot like UEFI. Submitted as a new article here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11560191

In between, there will be a significant body of research kept locked away behind paywalls by publishers trying to hold on to those cash cows and the inertia copyright on a work has once granted.

I think the best way to shorten that period is if we stop citing papers that aren't publicly available.

This is a hilarious piece. You yankees are good 20 years behind the real pirate libraries trend, started with lib.ru and well continued with the genesis lib and uneraseable flibista.is. Ah, I forgot to mention nehudlit.ru, which is specialized on textbooks.

Good references. On the side, seeing as most of what is the internet started here (packet switching and ARPANET), and there were hacker BBSs and pirated material before Pirate Bay, I'd say we were not behind in any of these trends. And go further back to the invention of the transistor in NJ, USA, mate ;)

Steam engine was invented well before Christ in Alexandria. However, its real life applications were really developed much later in England. Same with the Internet.

What the US is holding firmly is production and sales of space-ready elements for high orbit satellites, sorry, sputniks.

I really don't like national, or jingoistic-based comparisons of contribution by country, since personally I am an individualist. I am hoping for the day we have no borders or tribes or nations (does that make me an anarchist too?). But, if lines are to be drawn, I believe you're short-changing history here a bit. The U.S. doesn't just 'holding firmly in production and sales of space-ready elements for high orbit satellites' - it innovates and funds them, and many other areas of tech. The U.S. is number one in most advanced country in space technologies. France is number three, Germany number five. The UK didn't make the top eight. Maybe the ESA would be competitive, but that is a 72-member group, not a single country. The High-Tech sector, Google, Apple, and many others is dominated by the U.S., however, that doesn't account for sheer size. In technology, R&D, tech personnel, education and patents, and accounting for per capita, it is countries like South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Israel, Germany and others. The UK is ten on that list, the US one. There is a sub-culture in China of farmers building flying tricycles, deep-sea manned submarines to collect seafood, and lots of other cool (and dangerous?) stuff. Unfortunately, they are bound by an information-filtering, state government, but oddly have freedom in the countryside to do just such crazy tinkering. Check YouTube for those items. Amazing. I have lived in SE Asia for over 7 years, and I can tell you that I sometimes feel more free to do things here than where I grew up in Brooklyn, but to a point. I would be stopped once I became 'visible'. 'Tallest blade of grass' and all that jazz!

Thank you for sharing that. The US innovates for itself. Gamma rays protected electronics is for more than a year subject to sanctions, so Russia cannot build new satellites for a while (about 30% of electronics used to be imported). I am not patriot of the modern Russia, I am necropatriot of the dead country - The USSR, that makes me sick freak, right ?:> I believe the UK has the best research culture, but the US has the best research funding, except in some areas, where the EU prevails. But we shall see, China will win the Moon and the martian race.

Thanks for the links! I didn't know all of them.

I suppose that by flibista.is you actually mean http://flibusta.is/

Cheers!

Thank you. http://cyberleninka.ru is on the rise too. I download research papers from there.

Can't say I'm sympathetic to publishers. They've been rorting the system for a long time now.

When publisher substantial fund research more than government, I might start feeling differently. Of course, that will never happen as they couldn't make money.

I really would like to know - what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system? And why can't Universities manage the peer review system?

Universities can manage the peer review system - and many do. Many journal editorial boards have zero publisher employees and are all "volunteered" by academics. The publishers in those cases are pure gatekeepers and tax collectors.

They've been rorting the system for a long time now.

I thought at first "rorting" must be a typo, but couldn't figure what was intended. Then I looked it up and found that it was exactly as intended: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rort. Seems like a useful word, although I've never heard it here in the US.

In this context, is "rorting" synonymous with "unfairly exploiting"?

Pretty much. It's a term used a lot in Australia.

Not only as a term ;)

Sadly, that's true.

> what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system?

Nothing positive, as far as I can tell. I firmly believe that they hold back the progress of the human race by limiting access to the bleeding edge of human knowledge - all for the sake of money. I'm glad people are attempting to force an overhaul of the system.

An excellent article on the matter: http://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behi...

> they hold back the progress of the human race by limiting access to the bleeding edge of human knowledge - all for the sake of money

Pretty good description of Academia in general.

Those are some beautiful libraries in the pictures.

Assumption 1: the primary customers of increasingly expensive subscriptions from academic publishers are universities.

Assumption 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary customers of the universities -- students.

Assumption 3: assumptions 1 and 2 are correct.

Question: Is there any correlation to be made between the profitability of such academic publishers with the astounding rise in university tuition in the US over the past three decades?

Assumption two seems dubious, because universities in the rest of the world pay for the same subscriptions, but don't pass these costs on to their students. It may be true for the US though.

WHo cares about the US? The collective knowledge of humanity is at stake. The keepers are restless, believe me. And most of them do not even speak English.

Presumably some, but from what I read, much of the increase in tuition it tied to increases in administration costs.

As much as it is a broken system, in this case likely no. The actual subscriptions are cost prohibitive pretty much just to individuals and to organizations outside western Academia. The distinction of "western" is only relevant in that from what I recall working with Librarians at my last University job, the publishers do business differently with the US and parts of EU than they do elsewhere in the world.

Rising tuition costs are an issue, but in relation to an academic budget, journal subscriptions will still account for a very small percent of the overall budget, even for relatively small University.

The Publisher/University subscription loop, however, is indeed real and has been covered here before I believe. The short of it is that quite a few publishers are basically held together by taxpayer money in the form of continued library subscriptions. The need for a middleman in these cases is pretty questionable, as the publishers basically just host the content at this point and do no curation or peer review themselves.

While the cost for access to databases is quite high, it probably only a few dollars per student at most.

Which is interesting in itself, because it means that they could offer affordable personal subscriptions without losing money.

So in fact huge journal subscription fees becomes a way to trap academic research in these institutions, rather than just journal greediness.

> Assumption 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary customers of the universities -- students.

This is not likely to be true. Most universities in the US take overheads on grants. So if you get a $20,000 grant, the university will often take up to $12,000 of that (usually it's in the $6000–8000 range), and the researcher uses the rest. That money in overheads is used for a variety of things, including supporting the research (i.e., paying for journal subscriptions).

> Question: Is there any correlation to be made between the profitability of such academic publishers with the astounding rise in university tuition in the US over the past three decades?

Journals are expensive, but they're not _that_ expensive. It's much more plausible that the rise in tuition can be linked to non-academic expenditures at universities, including athletic facilities (e.g., gyms for students), fancy dining halls and dorms, and non-academic staff. Maybe one could argue those aren't the drivers of high tuition, but I'd be surprised if a rise in journal costs were remotely comparable.

> Journals are expensive, but they're not _that_ expensive.

https://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/

Would $25,888/yr for a single journal not count as '_that_ expensive'?

But I agree they're not likely a tuition driver. After all, institutions can simply drop subscriptions: they don't do much for attracting students compared to facilities.

> Would $25,888/yr for a single journal not count as '_that_ expensive'?

For a journal cost, $25,888/yr is expensive, but no, it wouldn't count as "_that_ expensive". I meant "_that_ expensive" as "expensive enough to be a tuition driver".

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