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Comment by MollyR | Hacker News Reader

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations." - Aaron

I think about his quote quite a bit lately. I wonder what he would have thought about modern facebook, google, and the extreme consolidation of american corporations.

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Have you ever had the feeling like "Uhm, I better not share this article even though I like it" or "I'm curious about a topic but I better not google it" or "I shouldn't have these files on my machine for somebody could find them".

These thoughts often come out of social pressure to conform, an invisible ever-present behaviour regulation, that we never explicitly agreed upon.

Social pressure is harmful to minorities, which is a problem, because we develop by minorities becoming the majorities.

Feeling watched builds up social pressure immensely.

Google and Facebook multiply social pressure, because watching is a fundamental and essential part of their business.

Ever-relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I think Aaron would've been happy with the developments in the field of scientific publishing over the last half decade, had he been able to see them. I've specifically got Sci-Hub in mind here. Sure, it's not exactly legal, but everyone uses it regardless.

I think Aaron had more than a little to do with those changes. I'm certain he inspired many within the academic world to think about where and how they published in ways they may not have in the past and helped trigger the pushback from public organizations that sponsor research in recent years. And, there have been numerous technical runs at the problem that were very likely inspired by Aaron's work.

It's getting better, but not by accident. People like Aaron made it get better.

It's too bad Aaron and Alexandra Elbakyan never met. They might have made a good team.

She's currently in hiding after Elsevier won an injunction. There's one company I'll be very happy to see the last of.

I still don't see why all the scientific paper publishing stuff is allowed to work in the way that it does. I mean, don't a large % of the people doing that research use funding from government grants? If public money was used to produce the research, then the public should have free and available access to it -- we already paid for it.

Ostensibly you are not paying Elsevier to access the research, you are paying them because they obtained the right to copy the paper.

That's the loophole that many of the writers use to publish pre-prints from their own homepages. That did not stop the publishers from suing them:

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elsevier-versus-open-access

Is the right to copy the paper an agreement between universities and the publisher? If so, can't the universities just give a middle finger to the publisher, cancel those rights and allow the research to be publicized for free, in the interest of furthering research, or is money that they get from the publisher that significant?

No, it's an agreement between researchers and the publishers, and the researchers feel dependent on the publisher for their careers (publishing in "high impact" journals is good for it), so they often blindly accept whichever terms the publisher shoves down their throats.

And no, no real money from the publisher is involved.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm pretty sure they get no money at all from the publishers. Other way around in fact: their libraries spend large fraction of budget subscribing to the journals.

Plus a one-time fee for every paper they publish. Whith the option to pay more and make it open access. And then the library of the same university will still pay to access this article.

Public need doesn't always align with individuals incentives.

Public wants new high-quality, available knowledge. Individual researcher are incentivized to publish often and in high impact journals. This in turn leads to both lower quality research (see replication crisis) and preservation of status quo in publishing.

It's not so much allowed to as well as that it's hard to change (although there's a lot of attempts to). A long-read on how it got this way at [1], and a shorter summary of why it won't change at [2] (which I wrote).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

[2] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

Well, "in hiding" doesn't mean that much, I think. She's originally from Kazakhstan or Russia and, thus, can't really be touched by US court rulings. She probably shouldn't visit the US or many other countries, but otherwise probably hasn't had to change her lifestyle that much.

They won't because they have widely different worldviews. For one, Aaron believed in freedom, while Alexandra did it literally for the glory of Motherland. Please don't buy into the simplistic narrative pushed by most Western outlets, Alexandra is Putin's fan who vehemently represses any discerning voice on platforms she controls. Like, a few months back she outright banned Russian IPs from accessing sci-hub over what she perceived as a personal insult [1]. This is very, very different from what I know about Aaron.

Tangential: the way she's covered by Western media is such a crying shame.

[1]: https://medium.com/@alexandraborissova/sci-hub-banned-in-rus...

The Egyptian and Babylonian religions of antiquity were dedicated to maintaining the status quo and they did so for centuries. They did this by carefully guarding who was allowed to have access to sacred knowledge to control who had power in their hierarchical societies.

Those with access to specialized knowledge had to be limited in number and properly initiated. Unfortunately, it seems like this pattern of social organization in which knowledge is jelously guarded and only available to the vetted privileged few is a very durable pattern in the organization of human civilizations.

"Beware he who would deny you information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

That comparison only holds if you consider those attending cheap state school on student loans as "the vetted privileged few".

Not to mention, even at the state schools, we just download the PDFs off Google Scholar because searching the databases is annoying. Nothings's really changed other than rhetoric.

I'm just saying that Aaron in that quote is describing a very old civilizational anti-pattern. Obviously, things are a lot better than they were, especially after the invention of the printing press and the Internet.

There is also a lot of information, such as how to make rockets capable of reaching orbit, that is covered by ITAR that is still jealously guarded knowledge available only to the initiated few.

Code as well, the other day I couldn't access code that was stored in Github because it was down. There was no mirror of it. The entire point of Git is that it's supposed to be decentralized and now we're even forgetting that.

Git !=== GitHub.

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