A key chemistry journal disappeared from the web. Others are at risk | Hacker News Reader

A key chemistry journal disappeared from the web. Others are at risk

chemistryworld.com

15 pointscrescit_eundo11 comments

  > that duty has transitioned to publishers as
  > journals have switched to a digital format.

I think it's important to note that this can be wholly blamed on the publishers, who froth at the mouth at the thought of any other entity holding even an ephemeral copy of what they consider to be "their" "property". They go out of their way, far out of their way, to prohibit and actively impede availability and durability - after all, a copy that could be distributed after they are gone is also one that could be distributed before they're gone, and they can't have that. And they don't settle for laws, they reach for the technical solutions straightaway, the digital equivalents of printing self-burning books. As far as publishers are concerned, archival isn't just indistinguishable from piracy, it is piracy.

> I think it's important to note that this can be wholly blamed on the publishers

Amen to that.

> publication in the journal had been suspended and there was no access to the title’s previously published content.

As a scientist, for me this is the line. This is the unacceptable face of capitalism and the abject failure of "intellectual property".

I don't care that some people round here squirm when the C word is criticised. We are better than this, as a species. Science is simply more important than the rights of the few to make a profit.

Aaron Swartz was a visionary and a hero. Alexandra Elbakyan is a viciously maligned worthy successor. We should do what we can technically, and financially to support the creation and maintenance of immutable, permanent, distributed public libraries of all scientific works.

Maybe you'd have more luck if you tried to address the specific problems with copyright law, rather than attack the massively larger, mostly unrelated and somewhat abstract and nebulous concept of "capitalism".

You could just as well argue that since these laws were created under democracy, that this is the unacceptable face of democracy.

We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. We can get a broad coalition of people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs to agree that the current copyright laws need to be changed, but tying that to extremist political stances works against that progress.

You make a very good point. It's a clumsy catch-all and lazy of me.

One could very well say;

   unacceptable face of greed

   unacceptable face of idolatry (money)

   unacceptable face of exploitation

   unacceptable face of dehumanisation

   unacceptable face of power inequality

Capitalism contains all of these, plus an unparalleled ability to create wealth, growth and innovation. For whatever reasons we weight these last qualities over and above the downsides.

So I hesitate. Should I use "capitalism" as a shortcut for all the bad things... or not be lazy and list them fully. Sadly we live in the age of efficiency.

As for "intellectual property" (perhaps the laziest of all catch-alls to kludge together a bunch of unrelated concepts); One could not just as well "argue these laws are unacceptable face of democracy" because they were never created "under democracy". Sure they persist under democracy, but mainly because they are extremely hard to dismantle. And other than the Pirate Party I am unaware of a political group in recent history that has ever made it a policy point.

In fact they come from a lineage of censorship laws that were created under conditions of extraordinary tyranny in the seventeenth century that involved the public burning alive of dissident publishers. Eventually the Statute of Ann consolidated these twice repealed and resurrected laws into a notionally "legitimate" Copyright. Anyway you can read all about that in any honest history of English law like Lessig's.

What we're left with in 2024 is a set of almost insoluble power relations that can probably never be reformed in law. They will have to be over-run by de-facto progress. Much as I dislike many aspects of "AI" it is at least a fundamental challenge to the absurdity of "intellectual property" and may have the power to clear away much of what is rotten. That's why I wrote [0]

[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...

> I don't care that some people round here squirm when the C word is criticised

I am probably one of the staunchest defenders of capitalism, but I totally agree with your stance here.

Capitalism is a really really good mechanism for optimizing for outcomes through competition. A huge majority of problems can be solved well by competition, but for those problems that can't be, rules and governance are absolutely critical.

For instance, contracting out maintenance of the Washington monument to the best-suited firm makes total sense as a competitive market. Deciding whether we want the Washington monument to exist or not is not something that capitalism or a competitive market is best suited to answer.

The wacky thing is that we don't even need to totally discard intellectual property publication rights here -- the New York Times had plenty of exclusive interviews they publish which I can access for free the next day at the library. The government has the unique right to say "Yep, you retain the rights to this publication, but we're giving access to it for free", and to do that by dictum if necessary.

>Previously, it was librarians whose duty was to preserve hard copies of manuscripts and make them available

We still do that many at many universities even now. Open Access helps a lot, as it makes it possible to save and distribute research without any hassle. Luckily only a few percentages of research literature is actually worth saving, and the loss is not as big as it seems.

As with this journal it is out there in substantial quantity. It's articles will not be lost any time soon.

https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%E2%80%8E0385-5414&item...

> only a few percentages of research literature is actually worth saving

True, but we never know which papers and ideas are in that percentage without some hindsight.

> loss is not as big as it seems.

It's an opportunity loss. Even poor papers are useful in meta studies and archival research, because they show the errors, and state of the art in a particular milieu.

> it is out there in substantial quantity. It's articles will not be lost any time soon.

Problem is, there is no coordination. And while old scientists curate wonderful personal collections, old scientists die, and so do their hard drives. We are at constant war with the forces of entropy. One of the biggest chaotic forces is the publishers who fight legal battles against science by laterally spending millions in "spite money" to take down collections.

The purpose of scientific publishing is to generate journal articles, and occasionally to cite them to operate an "impact" metric. It's not to actually read them.

You're more than half right. In the next stages machines are going to read them for us. That's one of the truly exciting prospects of LLMs. (And why we must ensure that the data and models stay public). Here's how I think the story will go [0].

[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...

Write often read never...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com