Indian Government proposes to buy bulk subscriptions of all scientific journals
indianexpress.com
indianexpress.com
A case is going on in Delhi HC against libgen and sci-hub.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/delhi-hc-asks-libg...
The current Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India - Prof. K. VijayRaghavan[1] have been publicly pushing for greater scientific literacy in the country incl. using the current rise in coverage of science/research in mass media due to pandemic as a platform to promote wider adoption of scientific content.
The journal aspect, regrettably not. The publishers are trying to shut down sci-hub, and to disincentivize policies of mandatory open-access. And they have a long history of getting in a door with tolerable cost and terms, and then each time you need to renew the contract, costs are higher, terms are worse, and both are bundled so "there's nothing you can do about it, is there?". Combine those ethics with Indian governance's potential for kickbacks, and sadly, not good news.
But it doesn't mean India hasn't done anything in the past to disrupt absurd greedy licensing regimes e.g. Generic medicines vs Int'l Pharma Patents. I see every day lives getting saved by generic medicines from 'generic medicine only' stores in India and not to mention India's generic medicines being the lifeline for other poor countries. For this, India's generic medicine industry has been facing the ire from WTO to Interpol[1].
[1]https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/Generic-maker...
Not my field, but let's say the societal goal is to continue to transition the journal publishing industry from a business model of customer lock-in, rent seeking, and restrictive access, to a model that's competitive, fee for service, and open-access. As this is a transition from a very profitable high-margin model, to a commodity low-margin model, the industry will be more opponent than cooperative partner in this process. Two policies which seem to me as having been notably helpful, are mandatory open-access tied to government funding of research, and the continued existence of sci-hub. Which suggests spreading the former, and avoiding actions which endanger the near-term existence of the latter. Endorsement doesn't seem needed... merely deferred enforcement. Sci-hub both remedies the societal harm of restrictive access, and reduces industry incentive to slow the transition. Perhaps something vaguely resembling this deal might be where we end up long term, but for now, it seems more like society is in an actively abusive relationship, giving up some of its limited leverage, for an untrustworthy commitment to do less harm, to some, for a time.
> generic medicine
Nod. Perhaps that makes for an interesting analogy. Imagine pharma had years ago offered India a deal: we'll give you lower-cost access to many medicines for a time, if you shut down your generic medicine industry.
[1]https://needgap.com/problems/83-finding-generic-equivalents-... (Disclaimer: I created this problem validation platform).
Yes, sci-hub has made the research literature far more accessible to anyone not currently affiliated with a university. Including journalists, and anyone creating educational content. Even in fields with an emphasis on open access. Which many fields still lack. And the introduction sections of papers can sometimes be surprisingly accessible to even young students.
I wouldn't even be considering working on improving science education content, if sci-hub didn't exist. And I used libgen the other day, to check the best-selling introductory astronomy textbooks, and find they most all have the color of the Sun wrong (really - there's a common misconception, pervasive in introductory astronomy education content). From some of the same publishing corporations too. It's something I've been meaning to check for years, and which finally happened, only because libgen made it easy.
It's not that I don't want to pay, I don't want to pay for an inferior service that only exists because legacy media is addicted to unsustainable profits.
Music isn't free on spotify, but it's a superior service to downloading albums off soulseek so I pay for that, even though 16 year old me in the 00s didn't.
In France it is more or less like that. You have to upload your publications to http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr you want them to "count" (from the point of view of public research).
Forcing open access is still the same as just paying for the subscription, as far as it goes, since if public funds are used for this, it's all the same thing.
Maybe just bill them as an extra tax if they want to publish behind closed doors. Gradually increase the tax until they see the light. Or call it a fine if you like.
Some journals like to issue a “surcharge” for this so some of the cost is passed on to the authors.
Eg: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access/agreements/elsevier-nih...
One group selects research to fund in the social good. This is the INPUT to the scientific process.
The publishers filter the OUTPUT: they select what is noteworthy and (ostensibly) good science produced with those funds.
If I got a pile of cash to pursue an interesting cancer treatment, you’d want some filter on the output to know whether, indeed, I did anything noteworthy with the cash.
You may want to check this assumption. The publishers do not filter the output. It is done for free by the scientific community.
Source : I have been a reviewer for many of these publications over the years.
- Before: institutions paying the rent might be lame and want to hoard the benefits to themselves.
- Now: everyone gets the same benefits so there is no competitive advantage of being the institution able to pay.
Of course, this opens up regulatory capture where few notice the rent seeking on the government, but I hope that there is enough buzz around this issue that that phenomenon can be avoid.
Can't these researchers get a VPN and access SciHub, Govt of India banned many porn sites, made no difference to its users ?
Use the same money and fund more research!
But popular subscription journals are seen as crown jewels for researchers and readers are unwilling to pay ridiculous amounts of money to read a paper or two, so sci-hub remains extremely popular.
Still, the government being a government can just mandate an open-access pre-publication in a national archive. China required in-advance submission of all technical docs just to allow a foreign product on their market. India is a huge market too, so there's quite a bit of leverage there for this.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy