Sci-Hub tears down academia's “illegal” copyright paywalls

How can knowledge expect to flourish if the universities dictate where the papers go for maximal prestige and the publishers paywall the papers for maximal profit?

But nobody should review for closed access publications. Reviewing is a largely thankless task that has only marginal career benefits, aside from the first few times you do it.

That's the campaign we have to arrange. It's what will break the deadlock.

Most PhD programs require a single publication. It's called a dissertation. Sometimes individual chapters are formatted with an eye towards publication in a particular journal, but I'm not aware of any program, at least in the biological sciences that requires journal publications to get a degree.

The argument is that Article 27 says authors have a right to copyright, but Elsevier is not the author of the scientific papers. Of course, I'm sure the legal definition of "author" is pretty flexible.

Dead authors of decades-old basic research originally published their papers where they thought they would be spread widely (and often out-of-band distributed preprints or xeroxes to each-other; it’s not like the authors were excessively worried about copyright or decades-later royalties). But now, through factors entirely out of their control and irrelevant to their original preferences, those papers are being locked away in a paywalled archive to support an aggregator’s rent-seeking.

Century-long copyright is bad enough for books and songs and films. It’s absolutely disastrous for science.

Even today, scientists aren’t publishing in big journals for the “publicity” per se. They’re doing it because they need to for hiring/tenure.

Elsevier and their ilk have basically managed to insert themselves in the middle of a big game everyone was playing where previously money was only an incidental part of the game so nobody paid much attention or considered what would happen if actors with malicious intent got involved. Once firmly in place, they started demanding ransom, and it caught everyone else off guard. Essentially everyone else (libraries, researchers, government grant agencies, universities, the general public) would be happier if they were gone, but for the moment no one knows how to get rid of them.

The tactics employed by the journal aggregators, such as forcing universities to buy bundles of thousands of irrelevant journals they don’t care about in order to have access to the handful with useful stuff in them, are shameless thuggery.

These are poor people in developing countries. They don't have money to pay the "material interests" demanded of them. It was obviously not the intention of the UDHR to bar half the planet from access to scientific knowledge.