Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone (2016)
science.org
science.org
Last I heard the situation in chemistry was still completely different. The ACS is also known for bullying cash strapped college libraries into exorbitant and unnecessary journal subscriptions.
Your statement is very, _very_ true. Physics and maths are ahead of the curve, and in astronomy in particular they hammer papers out at a rate of knots where the arxiv is what matters. Biology, biomedicine, and chemistry are totally different. Everyone uses Word (which I hate) and everyone's formatting looks like shit as a result. The concept that you could have "camera ready copy" is alien. Moreover than that, stuff like a data supplement increasingly needs to be hosted by someone else the further down that train you go. You or I would be happy slapping something up on a static University-run website or linking to it; that gets harder the less technical you get. Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved about particle physics was that everyone helps. Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd ways. That's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial" talk I hear a lot of in my world.
Heck, there are multiple groups "competing" in my field on diseases like prostate cancer, which sometimes makes the "losing" group unable to publish their results in a "good enough" journal, and it's not easy to coordinate or organise -- the funding bodies encourage competition. Physicists tend to take the attitude that "there is only one universe to study" and collaborate sensibly; sure, Fermilab and CERN are nominally in competition, say (or ATLAS and the CMS, say) but their competition is more about validation and they explicitly pool resources and ideas such that this is the case. I did my masters' in particle physics and am acknowledged in a textbook chapter I wrote with my then-professor -- take it from me, it's friendly. (I ultimately moved to biology because I felt I was too stupid to progress far in particle, and the medical problems were -- to me -- far easier to solve, or at least make progress on. Doing maths and building things in a hospital is much more of a "USP" than doing maths and building things in a particle physics lab, though I do still love it a lot).
The net result is that publication practices are cultural more than anything, and frankly in my experience only really the mathematicians and physicists have enough freedom and balls to do their own thing. I wish the other fields would follow suit, but there are a lot of vested interests trying to prevent that.
Just out of curiosity, you mention everyone uses Word in the life sciences—what is used in physics? LaTeX? I also have to use Word, and hate it.
Surprisingly it is possible to write math in a LaTeX-like fashion and they show up quite well. I have had more trouble aligning things with Word than with LaTeX so I kinda looked at them sideways.
> This simple test (suggested by Dave Bacon) already catches at least 60% of wrong mathematical breakthroughs. David Deutsch and Lov Grover are among the only known false positives.
Note that, arXiv makes you post LaTeX sources if it detects that it's a LaTeX document, and not everyone remembers to redact perhaps not meant to be public comments :).
The use of arxiv etc is slowly making its way into the more applied areas, so things are moving to become more open. On the other hand in quantum we are currently seeing the opposite trend, so much research is now within startups who are absolute flush with money, but typically don't have a path to commercialisation. So they do research, but only very little of that research gets published anywhere, so the scientific process is becoming much less open.
I have experience with both research in physics and chemistry in multidisciplinary teams, and my experience is the exact opposite to yours in terms of competition and the willingness to help others. Heck, the last time I released some results on arXiv a group that is notoriously unfriendly suddenly reached out and was all friendly. It turns out that after discussing with us about our results they released a half-finished draft on something similar that they have been working on, and presumably tried to stay ahead/dilute the significance of our results by getting it published in a peer-reviewed journal first. Also, during the time we were doing our work, nobody responded when we were asking if we could access data or algorithms. I don't blame anyone and we're definitely not entitled to anyone's help, but that's just a counter example and obviously depends on how well you know the field, everyone else in the field, reputation, etc.
I personally enjoyed using LaTeX for writing manuscripts for physics-oriented topics, but I don't mind Word for chemistry manuscripts. In fact, I would argue that writing chemistry manuscripts in LaTeX sucks for most chemists (maybe except for theoretical and some physical chemists) simply because editing chemical structures, reactions, equipment setup and process diagrams is easy with an embedded chemical editor object in a Word document.
I'm not familiar with how they work internally at publishers when getting manuscripts ready for publishing, but most journals require you to use a Word template with ready-to-use style rules and adhere to certain easy-to-follow formatting rules for everything else. Remembering my early days of using LaTeX (when I was already familiar with using Word for manuscripts), I could say the same about how cumbersome it is to do certain things in LaTeX without even talking about chemical structures. Particularly when it comes to journals that charge subscription fees, I'm not sure why you seem to suggest that it's on the authors to get the manuscript "camera ready". If nothing else, I have seen just as many crap-looking papers formatted with LaTeX than those with Word, and the same can be said about good-looking papers. So... I guess it just depends on the authors themselves and/or the editors.
For much the same reasons as what I have said about competition, I think your last comment is just as biased against your own experience than everything else in my opinion.
That’s probably because physicists and mathematicians have less to lose by openly talking about their results and methods, while in bio research, there is a lot of proprietary secrets about lab techniques and hard-earned experiment data, which many researchers see as competitive advantage they justly reap in exchange for the labor they put into obtaining it.
So the arXiv was a more modern, scalable, democratic replacement of what was already popular within the culture of the field.
I'm fairly sure Sci-Hub (and book scanners like CZUR's) made DOI useful, even (and perhaps especially) for working and teaching physicists at large research universities with excellent librarians.
Sometimes in the moment one wants to read something sufficiently old or inconveniently rare cited in an arxiv preprint or in one of its easy-to-click references. Or if one is Reviewer Number 3 or that person's victim.
A related question is "who pays the per-paper fee". Well, not me, and none of my colleagues. However, I've learned that the fees do get paid, but not by individuals. Rather, it's libraries that are paying, to fulfil interlibrary loan requests for papers in journals with high subscription costs and low readerships. If the number of requests times the price per request is lower than the yearly subscription cost, this can be the only way to stay within budget.
Where I work, research grants let me cover journal "page charges", but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor contribute to the library budget. This has always struck me as crazy, for the yearly cost of many journals is under the cost of publishing a single paper. Heck, we have researchers publishing in the journal of whatever, paying several tens of thousands of dollars per year ... and our library cannot afford to subscribe, so we can see our work.
Yes, you read that right: in many cases, authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read.
Some progress is being made, though. Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. That would seem great, except that they did not increase grants to compensate for the extra cost. Money spent on those fees is money that cannot go to support graduate students.
As others have noted (here, and in dozens or hundreds of similar discussion threads), things are different from field to field. I work in a field where it's just as important to read old papers as new ones. That means that the solution of authors posting to their websites is not always viable. Probably a third of the papers I read (in support of teaching) are from people who died long before the web got started.
I can't see why the government wouldn't publish all works under an open license when they (ie tax-payers) paid for the research. In the UK we have a national archives that has all the infrastructure - surely it should have all experimental results and all published, and unpublished, conclusions from that work.
The only reason I can see not to do that is to lock up research for private gain. That's acceptable if the researchers are prepared to forgo tax-payer funding, otherwise ...
This seems like another of those situations where government make terrible contracts on behalf of citizens/subjects/tax-payers.
That makes me sick. I'm sorry that you had to suffer this indignity.
Not defending the publishing system, but that’s what indirects are for.
As far as I'm concerned a paper hasn't been stolen unless it's been accessed without the authors' permission.
But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in non-belief.
They gasp in pure joy.
Back in school I had a professor who paid out of his own pocket for access to one particular journal in order to bring scientific articles to class. Our library didn't have access to this journal. I was disgusted by how these journals were exploiting him. I looked for a way to fix that and discovered Sci-Hub for the first time. He was overjoyed when I showed him that. Our classes became better, richer. He could finally bring whatever material he felt was important.
The damage these copyright monopolists cause cannot be quantified.
There's also the usability. When I told my classmates about Sci-Hub, they were also very happy because they no longer had to go through our library in order to access scientific articles. They can just download whatever they want. This is how things should be.
I can't imagine people whose work do not depend on these papers pay the exorbitant fees. And those who need scientific papers for work are generally the ones we call scientists.
Patent researchers. I was one. Except I never paid a fee just to look at a paper, purely because I don't know if it's any good until I read it, and there are HUNDREDS of papers I have to skim. You can always find it or something very similar for free.
Once we know it's an important paper, then our outside law firm would pay the fee, and it would disappear in their monthly bill.
I think there’s a problem in the world (at least in engineering) where research is being done two or more times because of lack of information dissemination. Once by the university researcher, once by the corporate researcher, and many times by the layman who is moving through conclusions on his own work.
Many scientists are juicy targets.
The idea of depending on your government to protect you from exploits is insane. Anyone in the world can upload a shady PDF to a website hosted in any country and suffer zero consequences.
Regarding PDF specifically:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chrome-zero-day-used-in...
https://windowsreport.com/google-chrome-pdf-security-bug/
Who said anything about "depending on the government" or uploading PDFs? This subthread is about downloading from Elsevier directly vs. downloading from SciHub.
The reply was to a comment about downloading from Belarus "where the government apparently tolerates the operation" "of PDF exploits" according to the commenter.
But I am in Computer Science - I know that the situation is not at all the same in other disciplines.
I think if you want to be cited, it is kind of silly to publish at a venue where your paper is not immediately accessible - there's usually enough other papers to cite, so it's in your own interest to be available.
That said, regarding the original question ("why would anyone not do this"), I know from previous discussions here on HN that I'm part of a small minority, but I wouldn't do it because I find it unethical. There's lots of things that I wouldn't mind having / owning but I cannot afford them. Just because they might be available through non-official channels for free does not mean that using that option is the right thing to do.
In this line of thought, I also think it is irrelevant whether putting publicly funded research results behind a paywall is ethical on the publisher's side: two unethical acts don't make an ethical one.
I love SciHub. I used it a lot when I was in a small college that did not have that type of access, but after I moved, I never used it again.
Why do you think that? I cannot imagine anyone losing one second of sleep over it.
In this case, they can't even argue we're depriving creators of revenue they're owed. The only point of journals is peer review. Experts in the field that filter out the bad articles and publish the good ones. Peer review is the only thing that separates these glorified journals from a random website. Those experts don't see any of this money due to concerns over conflicts of interest. These reviewers could get together and create a blog and it would be better than these journals.
The way I see it, these journals have literally no reason to exist. It's unethical to pay them even a single cent for access to anything. The ethical and moral thing to do is to hasten their demise. It is our duty to society.
It does not matter what could be, we're talking about what is. And that is that someone is offering you access to this paper under some conditions (to which the authors and peer reviewers agreed). You can decide for yourself whether you'd like to accept these conditions or not.
But if the answer is "no", I cannot see how that justifies you getting a copy without paying. Where else in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to have a snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for it, so I guess I just take it." Obviously, there are differences between that example and sci-hub but for the core of the issue, these differences are negligible in my opinion.
> Where else in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to have a snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for it, so I guess I just take it."
Don't compare physical things to artificially scarce data. They are not the same. Physical things can't be copied infinitely and distributed worldwide at negligible costs.
With data, there is no economy. Economies arise when things are scarce. Data isn't. There is nothing to economize.
> Obviously, there are differences between that example and sci-hub but for the core of the issue, these differences are negligible in my opinion.
These differences are not negligible. Quite the opposite, they are key. The fact is once created data is worth nothing. It's infinitely abundant. Scientists and peer reviewers are the truly scarce resources here and they don't depend on journals to exist.
These monopolists try to make scientific articles artificially scarce but unlike the entertainment industry they don't actually provide any value whatsoever. They're just a brand name.
About copying vs. physical things - that's one of the aspects I had in mind when I wrote that I'm aware of the differences between that example and the scihub situation, but that I also think that they are not at the heart of the issue. Hence I don't subscribe to your argument against that.
Nor do I to your last sentence. Where's the scarcity?
You're defending the notion that journals should be able to continue their rent seeking. Did I misunderstand?
I think the differences are definitely not negligible. There are similarities on the surface, yes, but one can distinguish between the two cases by asking "would it be OK if everyone did this?"
Basically Kant's categorical imperative:
> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law
In the case of stealing snickers, we can imagine that if everyone did so, then making or selling snickers would no longer be a profitable business, so in the end snickers would no longer be produced, and we would all be worse for it :(
On the other hand, if everyone were to pirate scientific papers, no economic harm would come to the scientists doing the research for those papers. Only the journals would risk going out of business if they don't adapt, and that would be (or could be; i'm not entirely sure) a good outcome, as it would incentivize a more open approach to science distribution and access :)
So, one can conclude that, despite the surface similarities, stealing snickers is morally wrong, while pirating scientific papers is not.
Interestingly, though, no-one who answered to my point has yet commented on the similarities. To me, no-one has yet made a convincing argument to justify why offering for free what others have the right to monetize should be considered okay.
Because having the possibility to monetize something doesn't make it inherently right to do so. People have monetized things that we would now consider abhorrent to do, like human lives in the form of slaves, wives as property, and countless examples of human rights violations.
Heck, even today in many places of the world people monetize access to education or health care for example, prohibiting some people from accessing things that are considered basic human rights. That they have a "right" to monetize it doesn't make it okay to do so.
I guess the underlying questions here is: should we consider access to scientific publications a right that anyone should be able to exercise? I personally think that yes, freedom of information is a laudable goal, and is definitely worth the inconvenience of losing some antiquated journals.
If you don't agree, what do you think would be the issue with having universal access to scientific papers?
Why do you believe these rent seekers have a right to monetize the work of other people?
I can at least understand where the entertainment industry is coming from. I don't agree with them, I think their business model is backwards. However I understand the fact it costs a ton of money to produce films, series.
These journals on the other hand are simply indefensible. They don't do research. They don't do peer review. They don't do much of anything except exploit their brand name. So it doesn't matter what the law says. We refuse to recognize it as legitimate. It doesn't matter what rights they have. We'll take them away.
If you were starving, and society was so misallocated in its resources that Snickers bars were in profound abundance, and political activism wasn't getting you anywhere, I would say you actually have every right, morally speaking, to take that Snickers bar.
But the other commenter is right. Comparing physical objects to duplicating intangible information is extremely misleading. If you take that Snickers bar, someone else can't eat it. That doesn't apply to duplication.
Many Sci-Hub users believe it is ethical to download copies of journal articles there, because they find the consequences of not paying for the article to be more beneficial to society than the consequences of paying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism
In their view, closed access journal publishers are stifling academic discourse with extortionate fees (especially considering that they do not financially compensate the authors and reviewers), which means it would be most ethical to limit the closed access journal publishers' revenue in order to reduce their power and importance, and disrupt their business model to pave the way for open access journals. Not paying publishers for copies of articles is how Sci-Hub users help achieve this.
I guess thats something of a stance.
My point is that it is always your choice, but to me, the ethical choice is not between paying for the journal or getting the paper off scihub. It is between paying the journal or not getting access to the paper.
I think taking public money, and using it specifically to enrich a private company, and not providing value back to the public who paid for both sides of the transaction is actually unethical. Moreso, I think there is regulatory capture going on, and manipulation of our political leaders through strategic donations [1]
If, by opposing an unjust system, you are doing something that may be in name "illegal or contrary" to the law, but morally that is sterling, then you are in the right.
By your same argument, you could claim that doing any member of the Underground Railroad that helped blacks escape from an unjust, oppressive system was also doing something unethical. Despite the legal definitions of property at the time. Do you see where this argument heads?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/j...
FWIW, I am an academic computer scientist too, have published in top-tier venues, and fully support pirating papers.
I'm sure that outside of workplace, every employee uses sci-hub.
This seems entirely within the scope of Congress's power under the Copyright Clause, and need not be tied up with other more controversial aspects of intellectual property law. There was a time when one could have made a case that permitting copyrights on scientific publications would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (e.g. because only journal publishers were in a position to efficiently provide copy editing, nice formatting, and distribution). None of that has been relevant for decades, so it seems to me that one could even make a case that the status quo violates the Copyright Clause, since enforcing journal copyrights pretty clearly diminishes rather than promotes the progress of science.
1) Other industries that are highly dependent on copyright (film, television, music) would viewers this as an existential threat. If Congress is willing to adjust copyright like this, we are also threatened.
2) Currently all politics is highly partisan. Support of an idea from one side invites counter from the other. I think it’s also worth noting that there is seemingly a strong element within one party that pushes hard against institutional science, making it even more difficult to distribute essential research.
> View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
The irony!! I can't access this link!
More seriously though, my first attempt to request an article for a journal resulted in an article similar to this being delivered. The subject matter was different, but it was better described as an editorial than research. Even though editorials have nearly zero value for academic research, the page fees were identical to research papers. The lack of clarity about what was being delivered was frustrating. The necessity research the articles themselves, prior to purchasing one, simply adds to the cost (e.g. through labour).
(I’m in favour of the world for both science and the BBC-style content, for similar reasons really - it’s generally useful for humanity and it seems spiteful to charge some groups when you produced it with the purpose of giving it away for free in the first place).
Of course publishers have wised up to this and now charge us money to publish. But at least anyone who finds the papers on pubmed can read them.
Pubmed also tags and indexes the articles so searching is easier.
[0] https://dst.gov.in/sites/default/files/STIP_Doc_1.4_Dec2020....
Note that I deliberately avoid calling the publishing racket a business, because these criminals-in-spirit and their empires produce nothing of value: they are lining their pockets by exploiting other people’s work, while those being exploited have no choice but to play into the publishers’ hand; enabling the publishers’ power brokerage further their encroachment on public information by gifting them the most precious fruits of their labor.
I’m torn, because I see both sides of it…moreso now that I’m not receiving a paycheck to keep it safe.
* Not that long ago people's sole access to papers was through insanely expensive journals, with prices that are absolutely unthinkable for a large portion of the world's population.
* Arxiv sort of changed that and a lot of information is widely accessible, granted you don't live in a country with high amounts of censorship.
* On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy affects the overall situation very little. People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies and so on.
* On a personal note, I don't recall using anything other than Arxiv for the past 8-9 years or so with the exception of one notable example involving a medical paper which was published in another location and it wasn't free. That said I purchased it, even if it set me back around 250 euros iirc. It wasn't work related in any shape or form, it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the authors published for free online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.
FYI authors of published papers don't see any of this money, it all goes to the journal so there isn't really a case to be made for buying papers to support the researchers. Even the peer-review process is unpaid work.
If you contact the authors they're allowed to send you copies for free and most are happy to do so.
This also makes it hard for researchers to organize their own journals, separate from the publishers. Many universities (again, particularly in Europe) use the publishing company as a proxy for the quality of a journal, rather than letting researchers within a field make that determination on their own. Thus researchers are forced to stick with the exploitative publishing companies because universities demand it, despite spending most of their time reading and sharing preprint copies of papers.
I don't know how it works in medicine, but, at least in math, I benefit not at all financially if someone buys one of my papers. (Book purchases earn their authors a pittance.)
I would personally way rather someone download one of my papers from the arXiv than that they pay the journal. Journals are parasitic vestiges currently used only for status signalling, and I can't afford not to play that status game as an author, but I don't want you to have to play it as a reader, too. (tempay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28423848) made the same point slightly earlier, and brought up the important point that, also, most authors are willing to send you a copy for free if you don't otherwise have access to it.)
Why?
Not at all, but, they will review a lot more of them before deciding which ones to cite if sci-hub is available. BTW arxiv is for physics math and cs, while the closed access problem is mainly affecting life sciences which don't use arxiv, and are only partially using biorxiv / medrxiv. There's still a very archaic culture there, mainly because there's no other easy way to ascertain some scientists' value.
To me, the problem is that the balance is heavily skewed towards the publishers. Scientists provide the articles at no cost (or even have to pay to be published!), reviewers do their work for free, and then you have to pay hundreds of euros for a single copy of a single paper?
While I understand that a paper has some overhead costs, the current fees are inexcusable. Scientists are forced to publish in "high-impact" papers so they can't choose another one, and you can't properly do science without reading papers. This gives the publishers a virtual monopoly - and they seem to be quite happy to squeeze every single euro out of it.
It's just rent-seeking, and I believe it goes against the very nature of science itself.
No.
What? Will they reject your paper if you don't present a receipt you paid to access it? I published two articles in Physical Review Journals, virtually all papers I cited came from Sci-Hub.
> Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it
Scientists won't get a penny of the money you're paying, BTW. It makes no sense to compare it to books.
Why? I can cite any paper I want in my paper, who checks where and how I read it? People don't even check if I read something at all. Are you implying that it's unethical to cite papers without buying them? Because then you fundamentally disagree with the whole thing. Papers are researched by authors and mostly funded by governments or private grants. These journals are just mooching off the whole thing.
a) Of course people who need to read the paper professionally will just pirate it (if they don't have access through their institution). After all, citing a paper doesn't imply that you "own" it.
b) None of the authors saw any of your 250 euros.
You are right to do that. However books are different from papers in that you assume some of the money you pay will go to the actual author.
You did not support anyone's hard work. The researchers who wrote the paper receive none of the money paid to publishing companies, nor do the peer reviewers, and sometimes not even the editors (and in my experience, paid editors from Springer introduce more errors than they fix).
Before the Internet, before TeX and related tools, those fees were needed to cover the cost of printing copies journals and shipping them to libraries. Prior to the 1970s academic publishers were typically run by universities and charged only break-even fees, and few complained because there was no better alternative that could effectively spread academic research around. Then a bunch of commercial publishers began eyeing academic journals (probably because they knew they would never have to pay the authors) and from the 1980s onward academic publishing has been for-profit. Instead of going away when the Internet rendered printed journals obsolete, these companies have instead opted to not print most journals and charge fees for online access.
Wikipedia has more up-to-date stats about total download numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Usage_and_content_stat...
First off, just because a tax payer paid for research does not mean publishing should be free. That's like saying just because the government pays workers to use pencils, that pencils used by government workers should be free. The company is still doing work, whether it's for a taxpayer or not. It still needs compensation for the cost of doing business.
Secondly, commercial publishers perform a vital role, which is why they still exist. If they didn't serve a necessary role people would have stopped using them. This is obvious, because nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head saying you have to publish your research in X place. But nobody wants to think of why these commercial journals are necessary, because it might be the fault of single other than the publishers, so people intentionally stop thinking to avoid the realization.
The only name of a publisher that anyone here knows is Elsevier, which further demonstrates ignorance. They're not the biggest publisher, they're not the most expensive publisher, and they aren't the only organization that pursues legal challenges when their content is pirated. But since it's the only name anyone on here has ever heard, they treat them like The Great Satan. That image further polarizes and enforces ignorance of publishing.
Payment models vary widely depending on the circumstances and organizations (or individuals). Mostly publishers are trying to find sustainable models to pay for the jobs they perform, which includes hosting, indexing, referencing, editing, proofing, and facilitating peer review, as well as publishing the journals as a whole. If you don't want to pay for any of that, liked over said before, the whole research community would need to do those jobs for free. But even in OSS, companies pay OSS developers to work on code. So somebody has to pay for it. If you're so outraged at the profits of publishers, then get off your ass and build the replacement. But people just like to complain, not fix things.
Would this be a new journal with a different way of making money or some kind of aggregator service?
Seems like an aggregator service would be the most appealing way to access the data for the end user.
I'd say these entrenched journals are being very cautious with an aggregator because the raw text data would be super valuable to companies, so they are probably going to try their hardest to limit usage of the data for individual access and bulk access. That's not to say an aggregator is not going to happen.
The simplest solution would be to separate those solutions, so there's one system for vetting information and researchers, and one system for finding or publishing information. Those can be different businesses or community-led efforts.
There's also the aspect that publishing does not have to be inherent to access. One thing is finding who can publish; another is vetting their information; another is editing and layout; the final one is publishing. And then on top of that, is access. All of these are discrete steps which can be done independently of the other, by different organizations.
App stores are one example. There's not one company putting out a million apps. They set standards and do curation, but the apps are completely constructed by an outside party. The app store handles publishing and access, but the publishing aspect is mostly just hosting.
Another example is an Operating System. They don't restrict publishing or access, but they do provide a platform on which to do all the things needed to make or use data. Technically you only pay once for access to the platform, and other parties deal with the rest (which may involve payments).
You can, of course, get the rest from sci-hub.
Is this intended irony?
10.1126/science.352.6285.508
I can imagine better ways to spend the money than buying open access right from publishers - though the current German government certainly has found even worse ways to waste money...
Thank god we have SciHub.
"Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists.
Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon.
The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology.
In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following.
First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other.
Second, “pirate” activists illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books.
These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting."
Source: professor Jakob Rigi, https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146