Beyond those institutions that have a financial interest in this. What would be the motivation for someone like twitter to ban scihub?
The science should be funded and free. The applications of the science are where the money is to be made.
These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era. It's time for them to fail and die off naturally. But it will probably take legislation to do so. And I for one can't wait to see them gone.
Elsevier is a very diverse company with a lot of product offerings that are not antiquated. People here tend to just think of them as a journal publication company, but they are much more than that. The company sells (through subsidiaries) a lot of IT products to governments and law enforcement around the world.
They, as a small example, offer a service that allow LEO to perform comprehensive background & arrest record checks on individuals in custody.
The company came to be so dominant because their strategy of vertical integration is effective and repeatable. Identify a market of valuable information; build tools to collect & collate that information; build tools for searching through the information; build tools for adding annotations or otherwise improving the value of the information; build tools to enable people to provide information directly through the platform.
They've basically repeated this pattern for science, medicine, legal, and insurance industries. So much so that it's really impossible to pry them out of a space because they get so tightly integrated that they actually become indistinguishable from the market.
I'm not favoring reed elsevier here, just pointing out that their dominance is very well established and isn't going to be easy to bring them down.
To guard this data to the point they were willing to throw Aaron Swartz in jail for 35 years is beyond reprehensible. It's simply abhorrent the way they have acted as gatekeepers to this kind of knowledge.
They are responsible for slowing things down. Not speeding them up. These gatekeepers are holding us back. Lives could be saved. Millions of them. This data is a benefit to humanity as a whole and it should be treated as such.
"Yeah, meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
You write like someone who's never heard of "regulatory capture."
Guilty but history is on my side.
Most scientific research is funded with grants and by universities with billion dollar endowments. They are not struggling.
You should not make money on the deaths of others because you think it's more important to charge for the knowledge that can save them.
I'm in medical. Some of these papers are life saving. Please don't discount how valuable that science is to humanity as a whole.
This is not about companies making profit. This is about science and the freedom of information. Data wants to be free and it should be.
I'm not discounting how valuable open research is to society as a whole. I'm not even arguing that, as a moral right, the research should be freely available! I'm just not seeing a technical path there that doesn't retroactively unassign publishing rights to all past papers. And I don't see how a change in political administration makes it any easier to convince rich people to give up money.
I'm not even convinced the government should take action here - CS work is done on arxiv, so it's not even as if Elsevier provides a useful service in distribution. Why are authors continuing to publish in Nature when they could put a PDF up anywhere? that's what we need to address.
I personally believe this is wishful thinking (similarly when I read about how companies have "outdated business models"). Publishers sell prestigue and attention, and this can't easily be replicated, nor is it unnecessary. The increase in research papers makes them even more valueable in my eyes.
This is despite me wanting to see many changes to publishing and science distribution.
edit: removed part that I deemed unecessarily hostile.
This saves lives. I think we can all agree there are certain things that are a benefit to humanity and we should place these things over profits.
These companies are less valuable than they appear IMHO. These gatekeepers of knowledge. More like stonewallers.
There's optimism, and then there is naiveté.
Sci-hub was created under Obama, I don't remember neither him nor the party making anything to help them, quite the opposite actually: Elbakyan has been judged in absentia and sentenced twice under his presidency. Were she to put the foot on Western soil, she would pay it dearly thanks to this.
We all know what we got with the Republicans last 4 years. Let's see what changed on the other side of the aisle if anything.
I know that we're not supposed to be snarky here at HN, but I'm failing to see how #NotAllDems is a sensible argument. Especially given President-Elect Biden's track record on this particular issue, and Vice-President-Elect Harris' history as a "hardline", "tough on crime" prosecutor.
I don't understand this perspective, but I guess my own is built from experience. We can never know exactly what Twitter discussed internally before taking this action, but there is lots of external evidence and signals as to what happened. It's unlikely to be different from the action taken by most other corporations with legal teams.
Small organizations with outside counsel can surprise us with their decisions since there are more concentrated opinions and higher risk taking. Perhaps GitHub and youtube-dl is the only outcome that has surprised me recently.
The precipitating event was a lawsuit in India and the subsequent reactions.
This article gives more details: https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-bans-sci-hub/
In this case it seems that they would have considered the actions of the companies running the paywalls. How likely would they be to take legal action (not all of which is public) against Twitter? Fairly likely, if they feel that Twitter is helping to publicize the service they want to take down.
This is both in the legal and financial interest of Twitter. There is no real blow back from kicking off this person and their service versus dealing with US corporations. Copyright law changes and the impact of court decisions likely play a factor too. I find it hard to believe that some court somewhere, hasn't held Twitter (or similar service) liable for indirect copyright damages (that is likely being appealed.)