• Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 hour ago

    You see, the problem, publishers, is that your “business” should not have been a business in the first place.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    11 hours ago

    While it’s true that publishers do something of value, the amount they charge is absurd.

    What makes it even worse is that so many of the people involved are donating their labour. It reminds me of college sports in the US. The actual people doing the work, the athletes, are forced to do it for free. Meanwhile, a few select groups: coaches, TV networks, etc. are making huge amounts of money.

    • dissipatersshik@ttrpg.network
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      2 hours ago

      Yeah, I have no problem with people being compensated for their work.

      The problem is that the discussion usually ends at “compensation” and never includes “how much?” Useful idiots believe that whatever price is charged is always fair and necessary, which is sad.

      In a system literally built around the amount of money we have, we sure do like to believe that magnitude doesn’t matter.

      • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net
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        47 minutes ago

        Stealing profits that are already made by stealing? Yeah, I have no sympathy for that.

        Tax payers already pay for this shit through federal funding of the sciences, just for the publishers to turn around and steal people’s time and money to view and peer review them. Publishers are thieves, so they can go fuck themselves.

  • Luke@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    “People often say to me, ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers. You hardly print anymore. The Web is free. Why do you charge?’” said H. Frederick Dylla, the former director of the American Institute of Physics and board member of the Association of American Publishers. “It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”

    Albert Greco, a publishing expert at Fordham University who is working on a book about scholarly publishing, said those making that argument are forgetting everything they learned or should have learned in economics class.

    “There are costs,” he said. “Does The Washington Post have a paywall?”

    Yes.

    “So is it fair then if some high-school student wants to really follow the Supreme Court and doesn’t have the money to pay?” Greco said. “Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”

    These assholes don’t even have a better reason for fleecing everyone than base greed, and they don’t try to hide it.

    • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      The existence of publishers for scientific literature is completely unnecessary in the modern era. They exist only to make profits to continue their existence. They don’t actually provide value anymore when research institutions can just conduct peer review and then let researchers self-publish.

      They create negative value (a bottleneck) by limiting who can access research for just… aggregating and hosting articles.

      • jabathekek@sopuli.xyz
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        24 hours ago

        wouldn’t it be funny if I slapped in a few ssds into an old desktop I found on the side of the road and hosted the entirety of human knowledge from it

    • 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers.

      We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.

      Instead, he just takes everything from authors and reviewers for free. Is he living in a different country?

    • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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      22 hours ago

      Elbakyan is an immeasurably more virtuous, noble and honorable person than these Dylla and Greco worms.

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      Yeah lmao, that’s the worst possible argument he could give I think

      “Have you forgotten your economics class?” And then compared public research to a private newspaper

      Like, lmao

    • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      economics class

      which is absolute ideology anyhow

      “Does The Washington Post have a paywall?”

      wow, you’re using the everyone else is doing it argument. These are fucking children

    • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      20 hours ago

      “Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”

      Tautology School Degree. Why not?

    • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      20 hours ago

      I could almost see sympathize when it came to paper publishing. Because the cost to publish was high, and not a lot of people buying. But now with electronic formats, yeah, they are total assholes in the current sense.

    • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      24 hours ago

      “Does this for profit news agency require money for information? Then surely academic research needs to require money to get the info as well! Nevermind that public funds are involved with a lot of research initially where news orgs don’t have that, we need to make a profit cuz reasons!”

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    As someone in science that has used this many times, I can’t emphasize enough how much this has accelerated research in the modern era. I am so grateful for her work.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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      16 hours ago

      A huge aspect of this also is that it disproportionately benefits academics and students in parts of the world where there is less institutional access to journal subscriptions. That is to say that SciHub has been a significant force for democratising knowledge and countering historic inequities.

    • Treetrimmer@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Fr. After I graduated I was cut off from access to scientific literature, which is a major blow when trying to keep up in ones field.

    • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      20 hours ago

      Yep, I just found out about it recently because I was doing research on a project. I had heard, but never explored or looked into, sci-hub. I had no idea about it. I don’t know how I missed it all of these years!

        • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          20 hours ago

          Yeah, I was bummed to find out it’s no longer updated. But there are so many articles that it’s still helpful and great. And she still is holding the flame by keeping it up. I’m checking out libgen right now actually.

  • meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    “stolen” is such an exaggerated misrepresentation…news organizations should really do better. When you steal something from someone, the owner loses access to it. She just liberated public research.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      11 hours ago

      This is why I hate the recent trend where people are saying “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

      “Piracy”, or more accurately “copyright infringement” was never stealing. What you’re doing is violating the government-granted monopoly on copying something. That’s so different from stealing.

    • Trihilis@ani.social
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      1 day ago

      When a regular person makes something available that shouldnt be behind a paywall to begin with it’s stealing. When a billionaire or company uses ai to gather data from paid sources or just straight out plagiarises it’s just maximising profits.

    • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
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      23 hours ago

      These articles were stolen, by the paywall operators. Elbakyan rescued them from the thieves. 🎉

    • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      Also I have met people who have published some pretty important papers, most of them use scihub on a weekly basis, and none of them care that their papers get “stolen”. And they all have some strong opinions about Elsevier.

    • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      20 hours ago

      I totally agree that she just liberated it. But since many lawsuits said she was “stealing” from them, and people who don’t know the details at first glance may think that too. So I think the headline is correct in a news sense. And the article is very accurate and favorable of her.

    • shath [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      like stealing video games that you technically license if you buy, you’re not stealing anything except access which is fundamentally the only thing they can sell

  • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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    1 day ago

    I realize this is an older article from 2016. But it’s just so good, I had to share it in case some here aren’t familiar with her. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan and she’s the person behind Sci-Hub, a library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers’ paywalls in various ways.

    And she’s my personal hero. :)