The UC System should work with other schools to mandate open publishing. The only way to fix this is by removing Elsevier's power.
I did my phd in an institution with very minimal access to some of these publishers and while it was annoying I would not take it among the top 50 problems I had in my academic life. I can always request an ILL, or ask one of my friends in other universities if I wanted a paper badly. If however the paper is fairly replaceable as a citation I'd just get some other paper that's sufficient and cite that.
Absolutely. I would be rather unimpressed if someone studying to that level was unable to find alternative routes to the "source". It should be at worse a bit of a pain and at best helping to fix a sodding great travesty that has afflicted publication for decades.
How do you guys do goose chase research if only one out of five paper titles that catch your interest are immediately available. Inter library loan is bullshit that takes at least one full day to appear. What do you do until then?
When the system's broken beyond repair and the stakes are high, there's no point playing by the rules. That's why sci-hub was founded in the first place.
In fact I asked a researcher in India that question. He said that they will write a letter to the biggest library in India and attach a check for 10 rupees (like ten cents today) and they will eventually mail a copy of the article after a month.
We are all super used to having instant gratification access to whatever article we need that it can be quite surprising how people used to do (arguably better) research in older days.
For a year or two my University library was particularly bad at getting access to articles and in that time while it was annoying that I couldn't instantly check references I just learned to read the abstract very carefully and only request articles that I really need to read fully.
Besides, if the university is truly trying to be ranked among the best I'm sure they will at least make sure that alternative options are smoother. That's what my uni did - it made ILLs free.
I'm in no way saying that the older days were better. Of course, scientists should have ready access to all the literature they can consume. I'm just saying again that reform in the Grant and tenure process, discrimination, overworking, the graduate student system, lack of mental health support for stressful jobs, lack of permanent jobs other than professorship, shitty metrics by which researchers are evaluated, research misconduct, impact factor based dick measurements, etc are far more important problems for me than journal access.
Surely, you see the problem here?
Why not?
Piracy is a problem for content generation because somebody needs to get paid to generate the content. Elsevier does not generate content, it's a (parasitic?) gatekeeper using network effects to extract rents.
If content generation would be healthier and more vibrant without Elsevier, then piracy seems an appropriate and just solution. I don't see content creators lining up to defend Elsevier; quite the opposite.
(It's possible that someone could argue that Elsevier adds significant value for their cut, but I haven't heard anyone make that claim)
I get the idea that skirting the law is not something we should generally encourage as the solution, but let's not get carried away and act like copyrights are some divine commandment and grad students using scihub are a bunch of evildoers.
A better solution to the closed access problem would be to only cite open access articles. Sometimes that would mean not citing the original article but some open access meta article that made the findings publicly accessible.
I actually think it’s fair to not cite articles that you cannot reach with reasonable effort. It’s the authors choice to make it inaccessible.
It is slower and less convenient, but maybe not $10 million a year less convenient...
In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist.
Spending money on automating that process, and you might put most journals out of business.
I'm sure I saw a device called a scanner somewhere. It seemed to transcend the worlds of paper and electronics.
I'm also from the UK and am old enough to remember life before "Brentrance" (newly minted term by me - meaning should be obvious) This issue of publication freedom is way more important or at least comparable, to Brexit in my opinion.
I'm not too sure what the perfect knowledgebase would look like but it probably is not the current one. For me it might be something like a curated MediaWiki (the software behind WikiPedia) - for me the killer feature is that an article in a wiki is just text and a few formatting hints. Text is first, formatting and other distractions come second.
I studied Civil Engineering in the UK around 1990ish. We had lots of closed off sources and refs (ISIS and others - from memory) - rubbish!
I work at another UC, and we don't filter Scihub in any way.
Sci-hub?
When I was a PhD student I don't think I used the university's library to access a single paper. It is not at all hard to find papers on the Internet and the money paid for subscriptions is basically a waste. Even in fields where this is a shocking concept I suspect people would figure it out if they needed to do so.
UCLA can and absolutely should walk out of the negotiations, and put Elsevier in their place (the dustbin of history). The academic publishing system that exists today is based on the premise that wide distribution of scientific writing is something that requires industrial equipment, and that is just not true these days. Elsevier's power is an illusion; they are part of an obsolete industry that future generations will have forgotten and they know it.
#icanhazpdf? It's perfectly good manners to ask a colleague for a reprint.
I may have fallen out of touch with what sci-hub offers, since I only ever use it to find books now (books which contain articles which one can't find outside the books) but the last time I used it, it didn't have many of the articles I wanted to see.
I hate to think that there are others like me who want to get into diverse research only to be stumped at not even being able to read it. This problem seems to be larger in philosophy/Marxian economics/etc. in which you really do have to read the paper to get the argument, simply knowing the results provided isn't nearly enough, because the results often can't be condensed down to data.
With sites like sci-hub, of course!
Pirating is basically never enforced against the downloaders. (It is more the uploaders that companies go after).