“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.
These articles were stolen, by the paywall operators. Elbakyan rescued them from the thieves. 🎉
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.
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.
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. :)
“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.
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.
Elbakyan is an immeasurably more virtuous, noble and honorable person than these Dylla and Greco worms.
I could almost 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.
Stolen papers. Absolutely. Stolen by corporations.
Is that the Anna from Anna’s archive?
/s
At first glance I thought, “so that’s what Anna looks like.”
I’m gonna look up Anna info next. I don’t know anything about her either.
You see, the problem, publishers, is that your “business” should not have been a business in the first place.
Kudos for being publicly visible and not getting disappeared by the copyright mafia.
I know a little about what it’s like to have people constantly try to remove me from places. At least in the electronic sense. Lemmy has a hate-erection for me, like no other. lol
Now that I experience hate and censorship daily, I have so much more sympathy for people like her.
And she has to deal with it in the real world. I don’t. Very easy for me to laugh it off.
But that chick has to deal with relocating, lawsuits, hackers, etc. She’s my total hero now. So fucking cool.
Removed by mod
