
The Rise of Pirate Libraries - fforflo
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-rise-of-illegal-pirate-libraries?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=atlas-page
======
Freak_NL
Open access is being increasingly thought of as inevitable and the only
ethical option for publishing academic research. What I believe we will end up
with eventually is a situation where nearly all new publications are open
access, and a good deal of older twentieth century (and earlier) research is
publicly available as well due to ongoing digitalisation and expired
copyrights. In between, there will be a significant body of research kept
locked away behind paywalls by publishers trying to hold on to those cash cows
and the inertia copyright on a work has once granted.

At the same time, 'piracy' on a massive scale (like Sci-Hub) will only get
easier due to technological advances and increasing amounts of bandwidth
available to consumers worldwide. Combine that with an utter lack of sympathy
for (academic) paywalls and publishers, and a widespread believe that sharing
these works is ethically just, and you have a situation that simply cannot be
contained.

I expect that in twenty years time you will be able to download almost the
complete library of published academic works from the twentieth and twenty
first centuries in the time it takes to make a pot of coffee — legally or
illegally.

So publishers will have to learn to deal with this new reality and reinvent
themselves in an open access world, or perish.

~~~
return0
Journal publishing itself is awkward. It's bad use of experimental data -
often you have to look at printed graphs to figure out data values not
reported in the paper. Statistic power is almost never mentioned. Tons of data
that could be useful to other researchers is discarded. Discussion sections
tend to be overly biased. There is so much research output, it's almost
impossible to refute anything and possibel to support almost anything. And so
on and so on. What we need is accurate databases of research results, not more
publishing.

We should be rewarding scientists for the volume, integrity and significance
of their data output, not for what they claim themselves in their papers.

~~~
msellout
Not all science is statistics. That's just the current paradigm and not
applicable in all cases. I agree the reward system is flawed, but it ain't so
easy to improve it.

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ommunist
This is a hilarious piece. You yankees are good 20 years behind the real
pirate libraries trend, started with lib.ru and well continued with the
genesis lib and uneraseable flibista.is. Ah, I forgot to mention nehudlit.ru,
which is specialized on textbooks.

~~~
eggy
Good references. On the side, seeing as most of what is the internet started
here (packet switching and ARPANET), and there were hacker BBSs and pirated
material before Pirate Bay, I'd say we were not behind in any of these trends.
And go further back to the invention of the transistor in NJ, USA, mate ;)

~~~
ommunist
Steam engine was invented well before Christ in Alexandria. However, its real
life applications were really developed much later in England. Same with the
Internet.

What the US is holding firmly is production and sales of space-ready elements
for high orbit satellites, sorry, sputniks.

~~~
eggy
I really don't like national, or jingoistic-based comparisons of contribution
by country, since personally I am an individualist. I am hoping for the day we
have no borders or tribes or nations (does that make me an anarchist too?).
But, if lines are to be drawn, I believe you're short-changing history here a
bit. The U.S. doesn't just 'holding firmly in production and sales of space-
ready elements for high orbit satellites' \- it innovates and funds them, and
many other areas of tech. The U.S. is number one in most advanced country in
space technologies. France is number three, Germany number five. The UK didn't
make the top eight. Maybe the ESA would be competitive, but that is a
72-member group, not a single country. The High-Tech sector, Google, Apple,
and many others is dominated by the U.S., however, that doesn't account for
sheer size. In technology, R&D, tech personnel, education and patents, and
accounting for per capita, it is countries like South Korea, Japan,
Switzerland, Israel, Germany and others. The UK is ten on that list, the US
one. There is a sub-culture in China of farmers building flying tricycles,
deep-sea manned submarines to collect seafood, and lots of other cool (and
dangerous?) stuff. Unfortunately, they are bound by an information-filtering,
state government, but oddly have freedom in the countryside to do just such
crazy tinkering. Check YouTube for those items. Amazing. I have lived in SE
Asia for over 7 years, and I can tell you that I sometimes feel more free to
do things here than where I grew up in Brooklyn, but to a point. I would be
stopped once I became 'visible'. 'Tallest blade of grass' and all that jazz!

~~~
ommunist
Thank you for sharing that. The US innovates for itself. Gamma rays protected
electronics is for more than a year subject to sanctions, so Russia cannot
build new satellites for a while (about 30% of electronics used to be
imported). I am not patriot of the modern Russia, I am necropatriot of the
dead country - The USSR, that makes me sick freak, right ?:> I believe the UK
has the best research culture, but the US has the best research funding,
except in some areas, where the EU prevails. But we shall see, China will win
the Moon and the martian race.

------
chris_wot
Can't say I'm sympathetic to publishers. They've been rorting the system for a
long time now.

When publisher substantial fund research more than government, I might start
feeling differently. Of course, that will never happen as they couldn't make
money.

I really would like to know - what do publishers actually do that couldn't be
done on a more open system? And why can't Universities manage the peer review
system?

~~~
wlkr
> what do publishers actually do that couldn't be done on a more open system?

Nothing positive, as far as I can tell. I firmly believe that they hold back
the progress of the human race by limiting access to the bleeding edge of
human knowledge - all for the sake of money. I'm glad people are attempting to
force an overhaul of the system.

An excellent article on the matter:
[http://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-
behi...](http://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behind-a-
paywall)

~~~
erikpukinskis
> they hold back the progress of the human race by limiting access to the
> bleeding edge of human knowledge - all for the sake of money

Pretty good description of Academia in general.

------
Kristine1975
Those are some beautiful libraries in the pictures.

------
wsfull
Assumption 1: the primary customers of increasingly expensive subscriptions
from academic publishers are universities.

Assumption 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary
customers of the universities -- students.

Assumption 3: assumptions 1 and 2 are correct.

Question: Is there any correlation to be made between the profitability of
such academic publishers with the astounding rise in university tuition in the
US over the past three decades?

~~~
privong
> Assumption 2: the cost of the subscriptions is passed on to the primary
> customers of the universities -- students.

This is not likely to be true. Most universities in the US take overheads on
grants. So if you get a $20,000 grant, the university will often take up to
$12,000 of that (usually it's in the $6000–8000 range), and the researcher
uses the rest. That money in overheads is used for a variety of things,
including supporting the research (i.e., paying for journal subscriptions).

> Question: Is there any correlation to be made between the profitability of
> such academic publishers with the astounding rise in university tuition in
> the US over the past three decades?

Journals are expensive, but they're not _that_ expensive. It's much more
plausible that the rise in tuition can be linked to non-academic expenditures
at universities, including athletic facilities (e.g., gyms for students),
fancy dining halls and dorms, and non-academic staff. Maybe one could argue
those aren't the drivers of high tuition, but I'd be surprised if a rise in
journal costs were remotely comparable.

~~~
nullc
> Journals are expensive, but they're not _that_ expensive.

[https://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/](https://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/)

Would $25,888/yr for a single journal not count as '_that_ expensive'?

But I agree they're not likely a tuition driver. After all, institutions can
simply drop subscriptions: they don't do much for attracting students compared
to facilities.

~~~
privong
> Would $25,888/yr for a single journal not count as '_that_ expensive'?

For a journal cost, $25,888/yr is expensive, but no, it wouldn't count as
"_that_ expensive". I meant "_that_ expensive" as "expensive enough to be a
tuition driver".

