Each time this subject comes up I feel moved to repost this article [1]. The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry". Brutal, radical reform is now necessary.

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio... (turn off js to view)

This google search[0] will provide a list of interesting papers about piracy.

They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here:

- piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the legitimate sales of ongoing comics, whereas increased the legitimate sales of completed comics. The latter result is interpreted as follows: piracy reminds consumers of past comics and stimulates sales in that market." [1]

- piracy does considerable harm to large institutes (but largely seen as a good thing)

- for sales, a lot of the lost revenue seems to be made up for "increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices"

- that DRM creates fake scarcity where none should exist-- distribution costs are now zero, we shouldn't pretend that we still need to pay so much for books and music

- how to make sure artists still have a revenue stream needed to exist is definitely still a problem, but it is not one that is solved by crushing pirate libraries

Also further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 (517 comments, recent)

And, to the person down below who wants to help out, check out the further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org (>1000 comments over six submissions)

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy

[1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p...

[2]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz...

EDIT: formatting

Related: Scihub's hearing before the Indian courts apparently has been moved back to Feb 2023 if I read the first comment correctly at the Reddit thread that is keeping track of the case [0]. The High Court website is non-reachable for me so I cannot confirm.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...

Edit: Confirmed as URL [1] finally worked.

[1] https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new...

Back when I was doing my undergrad in India, I was doing an internship in a lab there. It wasn’t a national lab, so calling that lab dirt poor is an understatement (they used to wash and reuse microfuge tubes). They would typically work with a budget that’s 1/100th of a regular American lab.

Naturally their research was also for the most part mediocre or worse. Except one paper that got published in a British journal in the early 00s.

I had the privilege of working with the first author of that paper and asked him how he used to get the papers to read back in the nineties when internet wasn’t a thing in India. Be warned that this university’s library didn’t even have Nature or Science.

His answer was, if there’s a paper they’d want to read, if it’s at least in a fairly prominent journal, they’d money order 15 rupees to the Indian institute of immunology in New Delhi with an ILL request and hope they respond. If they’re lucky they’d get a copy of the article in a few months.

They still did great research for what they were able to afford or read. Great research has always been done when access to articles wasn’t a given. It would be weird to assume that free unfettered access has anything to do with the spread of or lack thereof good scientific knowledge and research.

This is not even conjecture. We’ve already witnessed the never-before-in-humanity transformation of all general knowledge to the free public domain in Wikipedia and google, and yet, humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything.

In spite of all the roadblocks put by greedy publishers, access to literature has never been this easier in all of history even if you are broke. This even if you exclude scihub as an option (not that I am saying you should, I love that scihub exists and hope it continues to).

All I’m saying is, keep fighting this fight but don’t assume it’s anywhere near as important for any real problem in this society, general or academia.

The current publishing model is obsolete and broken. To start to fix it, publishing of scholarly/research articles and Books must be treated completely differently. Their only intersection is that the development of both of them CANNOT be based on a scarcity model.

* For scholarly/research articles, the solution is clearcut: Research institutions pay researchers a monthly wage, to do research and produce papers. It's as easy as writing a PDF and uploading it to Arxiv [1]. As a second step, companies like Elsevier, Springer or Macmillan can function as "webs of trust": Getting subscription money for their service, and providing a curation and indexing service as they do now. Shit, they even could provide Editorial/proof-reading services to Universities for people writing the articles. That way, the information itself will be free, and the core value of Elsevier and the others can still be monetized.

* For Books, the "write once get paid forever" model must be stopped. Once the book is written and published, it should be freely shareable. To achieve that, authors should use a model similar to "Kickstarter": Write a TOC, maybe a teaser chapter and look to raise the money he wants to write the full book. (Maybe the book was already written, and chapters are released as their full price is paid). That way the author will benefit in full for the "fair" value of what he wrote, and society will be able to use that knowledge.

[1] I did one: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1738790492983466495... published only in Arxiv, and it got 9 citations.

The academic publishing industry in general, and Elsevier specifically, are a curse upon academia and human progress in general. But they only have power if we give it to them. There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos.

Of course, an intermediate horror scenario will then come true if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll. However, that could finally push us over the edge to rethink intellectual property timeframes.

Related:

In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369378 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)

In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009809 - Feb 2016 (25 comments)

Publicly funded research should generally be available at no cost and bother to the public.

I wonder why there isn't a "spotify for books"? We got streaming sites for videos, movies and music, why not a subscription based library?

When doing my PhD library genesis and archive.org made all the difference in the world, I think it would take decades doing it via libraries ...

> stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty

There's no contrast here - these things are a result of universities charging more to students and paying less to faculty - you're comparing one exploitative industry to another and finding them similar, not different. Don't paint the universities as the "good guys", because they're not.

The article makes some solid points (e.g. that Elsevier adds somewhere between "zero" and "negative" value to the academic process) - there's no reason for this silly language in there.

To give them representation, if not right-of-reply, in this forum:

https://www.elsevier.com/open-access

What part of the contents of the above link is unacceptable ?

Lib gen and scihub are major forces of good, making scientific and technical literature accessible to researchers and students all over the world. Only the rich and spoiled complain about them.

Is there any at to support this?

Before Napster the music industry also had its gatekeepers: the recording companies: EMI-Odeon, Polygram, RCA, Warner Music, ...

Online music piracy destroyed them but then it created other gatekeepers: spotify, iTunes, YoutubeMusic...

This is just one anecdote, but I still don't believe we'll ever have absolute freedom of information. One way or the other gatekeepers sneak in.