I appreciate and agree with the principle behind this post, but when a store wants to charge me for using the bathroom I either find a friendlier store or else I hand them the money with a smile and never buy anything from that store ever again.
There are certainly sources of knowledge that are not cheap to produce and which deserve our funding and our appreciation. But I am not going to give eg gated journals one cent more than I am absolutely forced to, and I consider it morally important to make attempting to profiteer off of other people’s scientific research as unprofitable and unpleasant as possible.
Use fungibility. You want access to research, and you want knowledge to be more free.
So pay $50 for a book that will save you two dozen hours of research, and then spend a dozen of those hours writing blog posts and tweets telling other people exactly which easy steps they can take to promote open journals and so on. That accomplishes your goals a lot better than not paying for the book.
The set of people who want journal access is very small compared to the set of people who want free movies, music or tv shows. Moreover, most of the people who will benefit from journal access are people who have university access. (Although there is an issue there that this is much more difficult for small schools.) So there’s not that much market for it.
Undergrads typically need the physical textbook, not just an electronic one, for example to use in an open book test. (Though I was mainly trying to smuggle in a mention of a pirate site that does cater to autodidacts …)
I have a Bachelor’s degree and I’ve never either had an open-book test in college, nor heard of anyone having one. (Though we did have a couple of “you may bring one A4 worth of your own notes” tests.)
It depends on where you are, among other things. In Italy, about 90% of the tests I’ve taken in university were open-book, but I spent one year as an exchange student in Ireland and none of the tests I took there were open-book.
Sorry, nearly every one of them fell into which category? I can parse your sentence as being open to textbooks, being not at all open or allowing you to bring your small bit of notes.
In most tests in my university, people are allowed to bring pretty much everything they want except other people and devices to communicate with the outside world.
Many classes don’t have open book tests. This is especially true outside the sciences. The market is still much much larger than that for research papers.
I doubt ArXiv considers the hosting of pirated content part of their mission or that they’d continue to host an article after receiving a valid DMCA takedown notice. In other words, I believe ArXiv depends on authors’ restraining themselves from signing away their right to publish on ArXiv: physicists mostly engage in such restraint, but, e.g., chemists and medical researchers mostly do not.
ADDED. And over the course of ArXiv’s existence, a significant fraction of authors have signed away the rights to the final post-peer-review version of their paper, which is why ArXiv has often been referred to as a preprint server.
So pay $50 for a book that will save you two dozen hours of research, and then spend a dozen of those hours writing blog posts and tweets telling other people exactly which easy steps they can take to promote open journals and so on. That accomplishes your goals a lot better than not paying for the book.
Or, if you don’t happen to predict that evangelism is the optimal strategy in the context then you can use the dozen hours writing up blog posts or papers that directly convey knowledge freely.
I consider it morally important to make attempting to profiteer off of other people’s scientific research as unprofitable and unpleasant as possible
Are you the same Yvain who wrote that consequentialism FAQ and that optimal philanthropy article? Surely the lesson from those topics is that it’s not morally important to make your own life more difficult in service of “good causes” that are actually relatively unimportant.
By “morally important”, I didn’t mean “this is the most important moral issue”, only “something that moral considerations should bear upon”. “Morally charged” might be more accurate.
It’s always going to be “irrational” to punish people, but “super-rational” considerations say that going to disproportionate lengths to punish people makes people less likely to cause trouble. So I admit some of my beliefs here are disproportionate, but I’m okay with that.
But I do think that if gated journals retard the advance of science by, say, 2% (and there’s some reason to think they affect real researchers and not just amateurs), that’s not trivially unimportant.
Of course, if a gated journal article is the only thing between your research and a cure for cancer, you pay them the money.
But I am not going to give eg gated journals one cent more than I am absolutely forced to, and I consider it a moral imperative to make attempting to profiteer off of other people’s scientific research as unprofitable and unpleasant as possible.
Servers take resources to keep up. Printed physical copies take paper and take employees to work on the publishing and typesetting end. Open access journals are nice but sometimes there are actual costs involved in running journals and that needs to come from somewhere.
If you gave me a million scientific articles in PDF form that were previously unavailable on the open web, which could be redistributed without legal problems, then I would host them somewhere and pay for it until the day I die. The benefit to humanity is way bigger than the trivial cost to me, and I also gain some much needed geek karma :-) Are there any LWers who wouldn’t do the same?
The overhead is minimal. One of the ‘charities’ I’ve looked at was JSTOR, which hosts many journals. Their hosting and ongoing costs are trivial—employee compensation eats the entire budget; and they make next to nothing on gatewayed articles:
Those are pretty trivial compared to the costs the researchers bear to run the journals, and they’re not the reason that the pay journals charge so much for an electronic version. We’re basically just dealing with vestiges from a time when publishers really were necessary; now, all that a journal exists for is to certify quality, which you don’t need to pay a third-party publisher for.
Yeah, your point along with cousin_it’s point seem to be valid. The cost being charged by many journals is much larger than the actual cost of running them. I don’t know if that is completely relevant since Yvain’s statement doesn’t seem to be ok with even a journal that was charging at or near cost.
Moreover, the journal doesn’t even certify quality itself. Journals ask academics to peer-review articles. I’ll admit that this requires a certain amount of organization, but it’s nothing that a slightly-motivated volunteer organization couldn’t handle. It’s certainly not worth the prices that journals demand.
Servers take resources to keep up. Printed physical copies take paper and take employees to work on the publishing and typesetting end. Open access journals are nice but sometimes there are actual costs involved in running journals and that needs to come from somewhere.
I appreciate and agree with the principle behind this post, but when a store wants to charge me for using the bathroom I either find a friendlier store or else I hand them the money with a smile and never buy anything from that store ever again.
There are certainly sources of knowledge that are not cheap to produce and which deserve our funding and our appreciation. But I am not going to give eg gated journals one cent more than I am absolutely forced to, and I consider it morally important to make attempting to profiteer off of other people’s scientific research as unprofitable and unpleasant as possible.
Use fungibility. You want access to research, and you want knowledge to be more free.
So pay $50 for a book that will save you two dozen hours of research, and then spend a dozen of those hours writing blog posts and tweets telling other people exactly which easy steps they can take to promote open journals and so on. That accomplishes your goals a lot better than not paying for the book.
Or buy the journal article and upload it… you’d think there’d be better centralized pirated repositories of science by now.
My site is slowly becoming one. :)
The set of people who want journal access is very small compared to the set of people who want free movies, music or tv shows. Moreover, most of the people who will benefit from journal access are people who have university access. (Although there is an issue there that this is much more difficult for small schools.) So there’s not that much market for it.
You could say the same thing about textbooks, thereby proving that avaxhome.ws doesn’t exist.
There are a lot more undergrads that want basic textbooks than there are people who want to read research papers.
Undergrads typically need the physical textbook, not just an electronic one, for example to use in an open book test. (Though I was mainly trying to smuggle in a mention of a pirate site that does cater to autodidacts …)
I have a Bachelor’s degree and I’ve never either had an open-book test in college, nor heard of anyone having one. (Though we did have a couple of “you may bring one A4 worth of your own notes” tests.)
It depends on where you are, among other things. In Italy, about 90% of the tests I’ve taken in university were open-book, but I spent one year as an exchange student in Ireland and none of the tests I took there were open-book.
While I’ve never finished a Bachelor’s, I did spend about two years at a university and open-book exams weren’t unheard of at all.
Nearly every upper division physics final at UCI.
Sorry, nearly every one of them fell into which category? I can parse your sentence as being open to textbooks, being not at all open or allowing you to bring your small bit of notes.
Did any of them restrict the edition of the textbook?
Instructors on my university had no problem with people bringing copied books to open-book exams.
In most tests in my university, people are allowed to bring pretty much everything they want except other people and devices to communicate with the outside world.
Many classes don’t have open book tests. This is especially true outside the sciences. The market is still much much larger than that for research papers.
There is arXiv, but it’s mainly physics.
I doubt ArXiv considers the hosting of pirated content part of their mission or that they’d continue to host an article after receiving a valid DMCA takedown notice. In other words, I believe ArXiv depends on authors’ restraining themselves from signing away their right to publish on ArXiv: physicists mostly engage in such restraint, but, e.g., chemists and medical researchers mostly do not.
ADDED. And over the course of ArXiv’s existence, a significant fraction of authors have signed away the rights to the final post-peer-review version of their paper, which is why ArXiv has often been referred to as a preprint server.
Or, if you don’t happen to predict that evangelism is the optimal strategy in the context then you can use the dozen hours writing up blog posts or papers that directly convey knowledge freely.
Are you the same Yvain who wrote that consequentialism FAQ and that optimal philanthropy article? Surely the lesson from those topics is that it’s not morally important to make your own life more difficult in service of “good causes” that are actually relatively unimportant.
By “morally important”, I didn’t mean “this is the most important moral issue”, only “something that moral considerations should bear upon”. “Morally charged” might be more accurate.
It’s always going to be “irrational” to punish people, but “super-rational” considerations say that going to disproportionate lengths to punish people makes people less likely to cause trouble. So I admit some of my beliefs here are disproportionate, but I’m okay with that.
But I do think that if gated journals retard the advance of science by, say, 2% (and there’s some reason to think they affect real researchers and not just amateurs), that’s not trivially unimportant.
Of course, if a gated journal article is the only thing between your research and a cure for cancer, you pay them the money.
A takedown of academic publishers.
Hear, hear. I encourage everyone to buddy up with an academic and use that academic’s library’s access to journals.
Servers take resources to keep up. Printed physical copies take paper and take employees to work on the publishing and typesetting end. Open access journals are nice but sometimes there are actual costs involved in running journals and that needs to come from somewhere.
No they don’t!!
If you gave me a million scientific articles in PDF form that were previously unavailable on the open web, which could be redistributed without legal problems, then I would host them somewhere and pay for it until the day I die. The benefit to humanity is way bigger than the trivial cost to me, and I also gain some much needed geek karma :-) Are there any LWers who wouldn’t do the same?
You’re a good human.
Wait, what do scientific articles have to do with paperclips?
Not that I disagree.
You don’t know what scientific knowledge has to do with making more paperclips from the same inputs? Are you a dumb human?
The overhead is minimal. One of the ‘charities’ I’ve looked at was JSTOR, which hosts many journals. Their hosting and ongoing costs are trivial—employee compensation eats the entire budget; and they make next to nothing on gatewayed articles:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-July/109234.html
http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/
Those are pretty trivial compared to the costs the researchers bear to run the journals, and they’re not the reason that the pay journals charge so much for an electronic version. We’re basically just dealing with vestiges from a time when publishers really were necessary; now, all that a journal exists for is to certify quality, which you don’t need to pay a third-party publisher for.
Yeah, your point along with cousin_it’s point seem to be valid. The cost being charged by many journals is much larger than the actual cost of running them. I don’t know if that is completely relevant since Yvain’s statement doesn’t seem to be ok with even a journal that was charging at or near cost.
Moreover, the journal doesn’t even certify quality itself. Journals ask academics to peer-review articles. I’ll admit that this requires a certain amount of organization, but it’s nothing that a slightly-motivated volunteer organization couldn’t handle. It’s certainly not worth the prices that journals demand.
(grrr, argh.)
Technically true but a red herring nonetheless.