
Open access: All human knowledge is there, so why can’t everybody access it? - doener
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/06/what-is-open-access-free-sharing-of-all-human-knowledge/
======
Houshalter
I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous.

Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated differently than fictional
works. I don't really care if Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain. But
it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can still be under copyright and
illegal to distribute. These objectively have value to society, and the
argument for the existence of the public domain is much stronger.

It shouldn't last indefinitely. Maybe only 10 or 15 years. I believe 99% of
all works make most of their money in the first few years. Having copyright
last a lifetime, let alone much longer, is just crazy.

Put a cost on renewing copyright. This is actually how it used to be. Half way
through, you could pay a fee to have copyright extended. Very few people paid
this fee (because most works aren't economically valuable), so most works went
into public domain much sooner. Journals charge $30 to access obscure ancient
papers. But I bet they wouldn't pay even $30 to keep the rights to those same
papers.

Don't put everything into copyright by default. And again especially works of
nonfiction or scientific papers. If the authors want that, then sure. This
wouldn't fix the issues with big journals that demand it. But it still seems
like a sensible idea to have copyright opt-in, not opt-out.

~~~
zanny
Fictional works are not a special case. I'd _personally_ argue copyright never
made sense, but people like to say back when the marginal cost of producing
duplicates of information was greater than nothing, copyright at least
_functioned_.

Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to
voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other
people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane.

I've said it before, and many of us will inevitably say it again, but this is
not 1800. Charge for what is valuable and scarce, your creativity (or in the
case of a scientist, their knowledge), not what is not valuable or scarce,
which is bits on a hard drive.

~~~
dnautics
To help categorize and understand: I'd characterize your argument as the
"Stallman" argument, where the simplicity of copying justifies the moral
argument against copyright.

There is a alternate vein which doesn't have to do with value or scarcity, but
which has to do with _rivalrousness_ (that is a very subtle distinction):

[http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-
rivalro...](http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalrous/)

You may find it interesting.

~~~
abetusk
I think this is a mis-representation of Stallman's point. Notice that Stallman
has his non-code media mostly under a no-derivatives creative commons license.

From what I understand, Stallman is concerned about making sure our
infrastructure is free (as in freedom). The simplicity of copying is almost a
tangential issue. His point is that for a society to be considered free
(democratic, empowered, etc.) the people need access in a meaningful way to
the infrastructure that helps create that society. To me, his point is a
natural extension of forcing government documents to be under public domain
and providing architectural blueprints for public scrutiny.

Maybe I'm wrong and mis-interpreting Stallman's point. Do you have a reference
that would support your claimed stance on Stallman's 'ease of copying = moral
justification against copyright' interpretation?

~~~
dnautics
I have had an extensive 10+ email personal correspondence with Stillman about
patents. Tl;dr He's very much for patents that aren't software patents.

~~~
Kliment
I find that sad and disappointing. Patents are a curse upon humanity.

~~~
dnautics
I also had a correspondence with Eric S. Raymond, who is in general more
broadly anti-IP (from what I can tell).

------
dougmccune
If you're doing a startup trying to innovate in the research and academic
journal space I'd love to talk to you. I've put out requests for contact in HN
comment threads like this before and gotten great responses and great
conversations, and one even resulted in a funding round.

I'm a shareholder and board member of SAGE Publications, which was founded by
my grandparents. SAGE is about the 5th largest journal publisher and is and
will remain a private family-owned company. I know it's hard to believe, but
publishers aren't one homogenous evil entity plotting how to rip off the
public. There are lots of fucked up things about the journal system, many of
which publishers have caused or been complicit in. But there are also a lot of
complicated factors that are entirely outside publishers' ability to change.
Academia is a mess in a lot of ways, and much of the overall dysfunction of
the whole system has manifested in what has become the hard to comprehend
journal publishing system of today.

I live in Oakland and would love to meet up with anyone who happens to be in
the Bay Area, or just have Skype calls no matter where you are. My contact
info is in my HN profile. Drop me an email and I'd love to pick your brain to
hear about how you're approaching academic publishing.

We've funded two startups in the last few years. PeerJ is an open access
journal undercutting the traditional publishers AND most OA publishers (like
PLOS) on price. Publons is trying to provide incentives for peer review and
encourage openness in the peer review process. We'd love to find a few more
good companies doing truly innovative stuff that will have an impact on
academic publishing.

~~~
wolfgke
> If you're doing a startup trying to innovate in the research and academic
> journal space I'd love to talk to you.

Make contact with Alexandra Elbakyan. She clearly tries to bring innovation to
the academic journal space (though not legal one).

~~~
dougmccune
I emailed her to try to get her to speak (remotely) at a SAGE board meeting.
Never heard back. I'd love to have her engage in a conversation with us.

~~~
wolfgke
This sounds fair. :-)

~~~
dougmccune
Considering she's being sued by Elsevier I don't fault her for not wanting to
talk to any publishers. There probably isn't anything I can say that would
convince her I'm not trying to entrap her in some way. But yeah, she's got an
open invitation to an audience with the owners and upper management at SAGE,
even if she just wanted to tell us off.

------
zw123456
This reminded me of back 30 years ago or more when I first was messing around
with Arpanet and it was just turning into the Internet, I remember how all of
my friends and I were so stoked about how it was going to change the world
because everyone would have access to all the knowledge in the world and how
exciting that was, the democratization of knowledge. We speculated on how
everyone in the future would be so much smarter because they would have access
to so much information and knowledge. Some of that is true, but sadly, not
entirely. Much of the greatest knowledge is locked away. And even sadder
still, so many people do not really cherish what we have and instead use it
for a lot of ridiculous nonsense, which, I guess is me being Judgmental about
what the internet should be used for. I guess what it really shows, is that
the future often does not turn out the way you thought it would . I think this
is a case like that, we thought knowledge would flow freely like from a
fountain or oracle of wisdom, but instead it is filled with 140 character
snotty comments and pictures of cats with fruit on their heads. Sorry for the
rant.

~~~
petra
I'm curious what happens if we would design a parallel web, ruled by a
benevolent dictator that really wants to help humanity, in the wide and deep
sense(and we're lucky and it doesn't turn into a bloodbath) - how would that
internet look like ? and is it even a possible goal for a niche of the
population ?

~~~
droidist2
Sounds like China

~~~
tagrun
He said "benevolent", and also "really wants to help humanity".

------
Ruud-v-A
I try to avoid citing articles that are only available behind a paywall. Even
though there isn’t always an alternative source available, if enough people
favour citing open-access articles over paywalled ones, that should create an
incentive to publish in open-access journals, because in academia, citations
are everything. (That is a problem in itself, but it is the status quo.)

~~~
jobigoud
I wish everyone would do this. Like a code of honor akin to a copyleft
license: if you use open access references, your article should be open access
too.

When reproducing findings of an openly accessible paper it's extremely
frustrating when some of the references are unreachable.

I'm not in academia so for one I don't have university access to papers and
for two I often need to trickle down the references to fill knowledge gaps.

~~~
jean_claude
It's just not always possible to do that. I know it can be frustrating to not
have ready access to academic journals, but you can usually find the article
one way or another. Many journals are allowing pre-print publications to
reside on open-access archives (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy)
), some will allow 'limited' distribution of either pre-print or published
papers (generally means you have to ask the author for a PDF directly), and,
with apologies to John Gilmore, the internet interprets copyright as damage
and routes around it.

------
Roritharr
I consider my belief how this particular battle will turn out a good litmus
test for my pessimism/optimism.

Some days I can't imagine a future where universal open access is implemented,
at other times it seems inevitable. Seeing that I must normally believe it to
be a 50/50 thing makes it a great way to calibrate my mood out of my decision
making process.

More on topic: I wonder if we'll see countries take a stance in these battles.
Why isn't Ecuador Hosting a Sci-Hub Mirror for their citizens? The naive
observer might think there is only upsides for countries like these to such an
action.

~~~
dougmccune
I hope you're OK with a compromise between your pessimism and optimism. I
think what you'll see over the next few years is continued movement (with
increased velocity) toward open access for well-funded research areas (ie bio
and other hard sciences, etc). If you're getting decent grant money from the
government or a funding body (like Wellcome Trust or Gates) then your research
will be highly likely to be open access, and not just after an embargo period.
But in disciplines that aren't well funded it's going to be a different story.
Humanities and much of Social Science doesn't have the same funding situation,
and so therefore the existing system is going to stick around for quite a
while.

The zealots will argue that every service a traditional publisher provides
should only cost $20 a paper (or whatever other number you pull form thin
air). Except if that was true you'd have a bunch of startups offering
compelling publishing services for that price point, which you don't. Vetting
and curating scientific literature has real costs, and those who say it
doesn't don't have defensible models they can point to to show that it can
work without real money flowing. It's always just hand-wavey arguments about
theoretical cheap costs.

So I think your optimism will be proven right (or at least more right than
wrong) when it comes to well-funded research areas. And your pessimism will be
proven right when it comes to fields without the same funding structure.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Didn't the article say the vetting was mostly academics doing it for free?
Shouldn't cost much then. Curating can be a paid service as was the case in
the article. Whereas, I know what the cost is: SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate
if all one does is provide a collection of papers. Distribution to a world-
wide audience would cost more but could be absorbed by universities mirroring
things and using storage appliances like that OSS one that shows up here
periodically. Not to mention cheap boxes that cache the hot docs in RAM.

People that want fancy shit can pay for it. Meanwhile, I got 16,000 papers on
IT and INFOSEC out of ACM and IEEE through my university just using a search
box with titles, authors, abstracts, and PDF download button. All I need to
bring cutting-edge and prior good work to Hacker News regularly. Well,
summaries of it unless I find a public download that allows me to share. Esp
CiteSeerX, a perfect example of what I'm proposing. It's the bomb. :)

~~~
IanCal
Peer review is done for free yes, but you also need to manage that process and
there's a filtering step before you send things to peer review. Then there are
checks like someone going through the references and making sure they're all
there, that dois are assigned and assigned correctly, etc. There's the
software for managing all this process too, and then all the extra cost around
hiring people like management, HR, office space, etc.

You can look at all of these and say "yes but that's not hard it's just..."
but the fact is someone does work and that'll need to be paid for, so there is
some cost.

Often only papers that are accepted actually pay the cost, so they're
effectively paying for all the work done on papers that don't make the final
cut. Nature, if I remember the figures right, accept about 5% of submissions.
So for every paper, there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done on
19 others.

I'm not justifying any particular cost, but it'd be worth looking at PLOS and
their fees as they're a non-profit.

> SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of
> papers.

Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one
FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just
piggybacking on google scholar.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under
one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just
piggybacking on google scholar."

Where did you find they're just piggybacking on Google Scholar? I know nothing
of the implementation outside what she spends for a specific amount of papers.

"Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under
one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just
piggybacking on google scholar."

Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with
associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when
predicting costs of larger activities.

~~~
IanCal
Ah search appears to be down, and possibly since Feb. Most news articles
talked about them using google scholar and I'm sure I remember using it and it
taking me to a google scholar page but with altered hyperlinks. If you search
around you'll find other people describing something similar. I assumed it was
still like that but apparently google have blocked them [0]

> Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with
> associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when
> predicting costs of larger activities.

Yeah it'd be very interesting to know how much something like this might cost.
PubMed might be a good analogy, if there was an EU or worldwide version run
like that which had proper backups, etc that'd be very interesting.

[0] [http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-
science](http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science)

------
pasbesoin
For me, it's coming down to a fundamental difference or distinction: Those who
believe in a zero-sum-gain world, and those who believe in a net-sum-gain
world.

I fall into the latter camp. In other words, I believe that by sharing and
cooperating, we all can advance.

And, I find myself increasingly thinking and experiencing that the zero-sum-
gainers are my opposition. They take as much as they can get away with, and
they give as little as they can get away with.

Personal advancement, versus communal.

I can't cooperate with them.

And, I no longer want to engage with them.

I cannot afford to do things that lend or provide them power. For it is only
ever turned against me, to leverage further advantage.

Now... for "the community" to come to realize this, and act upon it.

~~~
ikeyany
> For me, it's coming down to a fundamental difference or distinction: Those
> who believe in a zero-sum-gain world, and those who believe in a net-sum-
> gain world. I fall into the latter camp. In other words, I believe that by
> sharing and cooperating, we all can advance.

People like to say this, but they are only okay with sharing things they
approve of. By your logic, aren't you morally obligated to let me have
something of yours if I ask for it? I'm not criticizing cooperation, just the
idealism that falls apart in practice.

The best course of action is a complex blend of the two camps you mentioned.

~~~
dredmorbius
It depends on how you ask, what you're using it for, and of course, the
reciprocal obligation on you to assist others, on request.

------
doener
At least in the EU there is some progress on this matter:

All European scientific articles to be freely accessible by 2020

[http://english.eu2016.nl/latest/news/2016/05/27/all-
european...](http://english.eu2016.nl/latest/news/2016/05/27/all-european-
scientific-articles-to-be-freely-accessible-by-2020)

------
yagyu
A light academic disobedience is to refuse to peer-review non-open papers.

I'm trying it for now, you could, too.

[http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-
revi...](http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-review.html)

~~~
dredmorbius
Organised collective behavior is better than individual, and much more
powerful.

------
sgt101
There is a more fundamental issue - try answering questions about science with
a six year old and google. Yes, they can frame their question, yes they can
type it into google, yes google provides links. But, click on the links and
ads, speedbumps and plain clickbait stop them dead. Very disappointing. Ok you
say, put an adblocker on.. well yes but there goes the revenue that keeps many
sites online.

------
keyle
To be fair though, if I had access to all these papers I wouldn't understand a
third of it.

It's the dumbed down version of them that should be more proactively shared.
And if interested, one can dig deep into the subject at hand.

~~~
SkyMarshal
That's the problem, digging deep requires access to the un-dumbed-down ones.

------
geekstrada
[https://openaccessbutton.org/](https://openaccessbutton.org/)

------
graycat
First, some of the "knowledge" is _deep_ , that is, has prerequisites, and
getting through the prerequisites can use some guidance, help, etc., say, in
high school, college, and graduate schools.

Next, finding the material on the Internet, say, 1 trillion or so Web pages,
is too often from difficult to much worse. My startup is intended to help with
that.

~~~
GroSacASacs
How do you helm with that

~~~
graycat
By "helm" you mean "help"?

I've developed a new Internet _search_ engine except it's very different from
any other _search_ engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) and is more for
discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, and subscription. Mostly
it's for discovery and recommendation.

What Google, etc. do is part of what long ago the field of _information
retrieval_ characterized as just part of the problem, the part where the user
knows that the content exists, knows they will like the content, and has
keywords/phrases that characterize that content. For that part, Google, Bing,
etc. work great. But, again, as has been known for decades, that's only part
of the problem.

I'm attacking the rest of the problem, that is, where a user knows less about
what they want. For that I derived some new mathematics, with some advanced
prerequisites, with theorems and proofs, designed the business model, the user
interface, the Web pages, the SQL database, the software and server farm
architecture and the code, wrote the code, for the production code, 20,000
programming language statements in 80,000 lines of typing. The code is darned
fast and appears to run as intended. Currently the code is in alpha test. Then
beta test and going live.

------
IncRnd
The premise of the click-bait title is clearly false.

------
bra-ket
An article on open access without mentioning sci-hub?

~~~
wolfgke
> An article on open access without mentioning sci-hub

and libgen (the latter one really isn't mentioned).

~~~
geonnave
Actually, both Sci-Hub and LibGen are mentioned in the article. Perhaps your
ctrl+f failed because the page only loads the next section when you scroll
down near the bottom of the page.

~~~
wolfgke
> Perhaps your ctrl+f failed because the page only loads the next section when
> you scroll down near the bottom of the page.

Exactly that happened.

~~~
duncan_bayne
...? I'm confused as to why anyone would do that, when just loading a page of
HTML and letting the user scroll is a demonstrably superior solution.

~~~
gavinpc
The charitable view is that this saves bandwidth (and load time) for page
views that never get scrolled. Also, it may allow them to count the ads in
those sections as impressions without having to paginate the article, which
presumably they know that people hate.

But I think it's ironic for an article about open access to make itself
essentially unprintable in this way. It's too long for me to read on the
screen. A "page of HTML" would be demonstrably superior for that purpose.

