Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.
This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be done about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users?
You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable.
The subreddit tries to argue that it's fair use: https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html
That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the eyes of the law?
To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal activity."
Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics.
The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright.
Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it is essentially impossible without academic access.
I ended up going to the Library of Congress and do the research there.
No matter how much we wish the world was different, that's how the law is currently set up.
The fact that digital copies are rather easier to loan out, and the fact that you don't much care if you get the copy back, shouldn't make /r/scholar illegal. It might, but it shouldn't.
Without going this far, I personally think civil disobedience is ok in that case. How can you change the law, if the law is absolute? (I've noticed that this is a rather controversial opinion though.)
* the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
* the nature of the copyrighted work;
* the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
* the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
It doesn't have to pass all those tests but it likely will need to pass more than just one of them.
Fair Use is an affirmative defense. That is: it's not a right to use copyrighted works, but, in the event infringement is alleged, it may be invoked as a defense.
Specifically the language of US statute is "the factors to be considered shall include". Which can be read as also allowing other considerations. Though I don't know offhand of specific legal gloss or caselaw demonstrating otherwise. The Wikipedia article you cite has that specific claim flagged as "citation required" at this time.
This has been litigated in a number of "copy shop" cases (the most important involving UT and Elsiver if I'm not mistaken, but I can't look it up just now) and this is almost certainly not fair use.
Awesome. Thanks for the heads-up.
In 2012, I graduated from dental school in debt up to my EYEBALLS[2], and look, I can NOT afford the per article fee required for me to form my own opinions on important dental topics like implantology, oral surgery, adhesive bonding, high strength porcelains. I've had to rely on reading literally tens of thousands of forum posts[3] by dentists to sort out the totally-wrong from the quite-valuable information, to see if the "thought-leaders" (the well-known dentists who are paid to write articles) are supported by fact.
I sent a letter to the dean of my dental school about being able to read primary lit articles like I could in school, here's a quote from the letter: "As you are undoubtedly aware, one of the School’s objectives in its mission statement is a devotion of “time and resources to the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge.” Considering this goal, it is frustrating for the School of Dentistry to espouse the value of scientific research yet deny alumni access to the primary literature." I received a very polite non-answer and no action in the two years since I sent it. Ef that.
I did, however, receive a letter asking me to donate $1,250 to the School on the occasion of their 125th anniversary. That made me just a little bit upset.
So, sillysaurus3, you finally gave me the tools to round out my collection of dental primary literature articles in Pages 2.7.3 (per the second footnote of this post, you will note that I can not afford to upgrade to Papers 3). Because of your post, I can become a better dentist, faster, with fewer errors.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
[1] And I became a father four months ago.
[2] Seriously, my student loan payments are 2.7x my house payment. 35% of my after tax income is student loan payments. It's... sad.
[3] DentalTown.com ... the good, the bad, and the ugly in dentistry. Just don't go on their political forums. Good God, what a bunch of fools.
Most surprising of all was the casual ignorance of the majority of 'dentists'/'implantologists' on the DentalTown implants forum. I'd certainly never want any of them in the vicinity of my mouth.
As for these institutions trumpeting their devotion to the 'dissemination of new knowledge', get in touch with Dr Pirker at BioImplant, and ask for his point of view on the subject...
I so hope you replied enclosing your previous correspondence as your reason to decline.
The articles have intrinsic scientific value that's even greater when they are being read.
That or http://sci-hub.org/ (it's instant)
Also, to anyone with access to scientific literature: We welcome you to "pay it forward" and fulfill some requests on <a href="https://reddit.com/r/scholar>/r/scholar</a> yourself.
"The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."
> to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication
This new policy removes the 12 month embargo.
Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
All that's left is the upfront author's cost. That's often north of 1000$ now.
The journals are a racket supported by government research. Peer review can be financed outside of locking out people from being able to read the final product.
Similar policies are or soon will be in place at many of the largest grant agencies in other countries (Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, etc), and more are coming online. I expect we'll see this become near-universal by the end of the decade.
The Gates policy is unusual in that it has no embargo period. That's not true of many of the other policies, including the NIH policy and the broader US policy. It'll be interesting to see if Gates causes other grant agencies to shorten or eliminate their embargo periods.
Another unusual feature of the Gates policy: it requires a CC-BY license on the paper. That means that, at least in principle, some other publisher could simply republish the paper immediately, perhaps enriching it in various ways. It's a very interesting move.
Incidentally, if anyone is interested: the best source of news about open access is Peter Suber's open access tracking project. It can be followed on Twitter at @oatp. Another good account is @SPARC_NA - SPARC has done a lot of the ground work preparing the way for open access policies.
The Gates Foundation is pushing for a lot less NIH syndrome and a lot more reuse I hope.
I'm a little nervous about forceful approaches though. There are outcomes that come from a culture of compliance, and there are outcomes that come from more organic dynamics. I think the latter will usually produce better results.
IE, I would prefer that the scientific community just take publications less seriously if the underlying data in not available similarly to how they would treat publications that are not peer reviewed.
The goal is to improve science. But if the actual publications and researchers are motivated by Gates-compliance or Government-compliance, that could get derailed.
This is not to say that the academic publishing isn't a complete mess. I get pissed off every time I have to sign away my copyright to a publisher, or spend a day reviewing a paper without compensation, while the publishers rake in hundreds of millions in profits.
However, realistically the requirement of free access today means nothing more than that I have to pay the journal a couple of $k extra. Also realistically, that money is going to be away from the rest of my budget somehow, which means I can pay less salaries. At the same time, the university is still going to pay the same for access to the digital libraries, so the end result is that a pile of money that was going to pay for a researcher's monthly salary now goes to the publisher instead.
A better use of the tax/donation money would be to establish new open access venues to publish (journals, conferences) to demolish the outdated publisher model.
We're not talking about classified material here, it's research literally done so that others can learn.
> Nor would your average tax payer get any value out of being able to access the research papers.
Sure they would because it would allow more people who can get value out of them to do so, thus increasing the amount of knowledge for us all.