Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

Since it's just a login/access to proxied logins, Sci-hub has a third option which they will most definitely double-down on: try to "fix" the log in problem they have.

As important as I do think piracy is for situations just like this, the problem with trying to understand piracy in a market environment is that piracy doesn't really follow the same rules as other market elements. While there may be some economic value to pirates, for the most part, they can compete on cost and free of the trappings of business deals. They don't have to worry about making a profit, and as such are not influenced by the responses from other elements, such as those they're pirating from.

This isn't "oh woe to the publishers"; I do think they've been bending us over forever. But to expect them to respond to piracy as they would another business is unrealistic in my mind, especially when they can just regulate and sue their way to their goals.

What hopefully happens as a result of Sci-hub is that it will change the way that researchers and their institutions look towards paper publication in the future, once they realize that there's no longer a need for Elsevier and its kin. That is change I hope happens. But to expect Elsevier et. al. to do anything but try to return to their status quo is kind of absurd.

Measures like geoblocking just drive people in markets who are blocked from accessing content, or who are charged higher prices, to just pirate the material. Or alternatively they bypass the geoblocks.

Even now people are starting to ignore the various mechanisms used to bypass geoblocks as its getting harder to achieve, but before publishers start congratulating themselves they should consider that those people who bypassed their geoblocks were willing to pay what they consider a far price for that content. The fact is, in most cases they bypass the geoblocks because the pricing is not fair.

I'm not sure these publishers can legitimately claim how unfair it is that people steal their content when they are literally discriminating against people by charging them higher prices based on their nationality.

There may be an ethical weight you can assign to stealing and a lower ethical weight you can assign to price gouging, but they are both unethical.

I often find it interesting when I bring up the fact that there is a fundamental unfairness to geoblocking that people immediately chime in to state that stealing is wrong, but they don't consider that a case can also be made that price gouging is really a form of theft of a consumers limited resources.

I would much prefer an anonymous network anyways.

It would probably be better to break down the torrents into smaller, more coherent, and organized collections that contain all associated metadata (e.g. a collection of biology papers from a certain time-span or set of publications). That way you might incentivize people to maintain smaller personal-use archives that could be recombined back into the whole, if the need arises.

You could perhaps even build a system that could automatically generate, publish, and consume torrents with a particular (metadata + content) layout, but that's not restricted to a particular set of torrents. Then it could just consume certain topics from a feed of new torrents, from various sources, on the Pirate Bay.

Heaven forbid you help propagate lesser used stuff as payment for getting access to the few papers that you feel entitled to get for free...

There may not be actual guns involved, but funding and research opportunities are very much on the line.

Which raises the question: who are the pirates here?

In what sense is a corporation holding an entire professional community to ransom while adding no real value not being piratical?

In reality the journal publishing "industry" is just another example of aggressive for-profit enclosure of what was once considered a public good.

I'm more ambivalent about rights issues around creative works, because I think everyone wins when unusually talented artists and creators earn enough to work full time.

But academic publishing seems straightforward extortion of value from universities and governments - ultimately from tax payers - with no plausible upside.

For Forbes you could use incognito and click twice (find article in Google, click, close tab, click again) usually works for me.