* Not that long ago people's sole access to papers was through insanely expensive journals, with prices that are absolutely unthinkable for a large portion of the world's population.
* Arxiv sort of changed that and a lot of information is widely accessible, granted you don't live in a country with high amounts of censorship.
* On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy affects the overall situation very little. People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies and so on.
* On a personal note, I don't recall using anything other than Arxiv for the past 8-9 years or so with the exception of one notable example involving a medical paper which was published in another location and it wasn't free. That said I purchased it, even if it set me back around 250 euros iirc. It wasn't work related in any shape or form, it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the authors published for free online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.
Who are you supporting, though? The scientists won't see a single euro of that.
To me, the problem is that the balance is heavily skewed towards the publishers. Scientists provide the articles at no cost (or even have to pay to be published!), reviewers do their work for free, and then you have to pay hundreds of euros for a single copy of a single paper?
While I understand that a paper has some overhead costs, the current fees are inexcusable. Scientists are forced to publish in "high-impact" papers so they can't choose another one, and you can't properly do science without reading papers. This gives the publishers a virtual monopoly - and they seem to be quite happy to squeeze every single euro out of it.
It's just rent-seeking, and I believe it goes against the very nature of science itself.
> it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work
FYI authors of published papers don't see any of this money, it all goes to the journal so there isn't really a case to be made for buying papers to support the researchers. Even the peer-review process is unpaid work.
If you contact the authors they're allowed to send you copies for free and most are happy to do so.
I've never bothered publishing anything, just circumstantially gave a hand several people that have(I don't want my name to pop up in papers for a million and one reasons). I assumed they were since otherwise I saw no logical reason to go for anything other than Arxiv and publish them for free.
Universities, especially in Europe, base hiring and tenure decisions in part on where a researcher's papers are published. A paper published on arxiv has less value to advancing one's career than one published in a journal run by a well-known academic publisher.
This also makes it hard for researchers to organize their own journals, separate from the publishers. Many universities (again, particularly in Europe) use the publishing company as a proxy for the quality of a journal, rather than letting researchers within a field make that determination on their own. Thus researchers are forced to stick with the exploitative publishing companies because universities demand it, despite spending most of their time reading and sharing preprint copies of papers.
People publish in journals (etc) because of the peer review and reputation. People are much more likely to read, trust, cite a paper that’s been through peer review. Also people are more likely to discover the paper by looking in prestigious venues than if it’s just in the arxiv flood. For promotion and tenure, papers aren’t considered unless they’re published and prestigious venues count much more.
> Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the authors published for free online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.
I don't know how it works in medicine, but, at least in math, I benefit not at all financially if someone buys one of my papers. (Book purchases earn their authors a pittance.)
I would personally way rather someone download one of my papers from the arXiv than that they pay the journal. Journals are parasitic vestiges currently used only for status signalling, and I can't afford not to play that status game as an author, but I don't want you to have to play it as a reader, too. (tempay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28423848) made the same point slightly earlier, and brought up the important point that, also, most authors are willing to send you a copy for free if you don't otherwise have access to it.)
> * On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy affects the overall situation very little. People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies and so on.
Why? I can cite any paper I want in my paper, who checks where and how I read it? People don't even check if I read something at all. Are you implying that it's unethical to cite papers without buying them? Because then you fundamentally disagree with the whole thing. Papers are researched by authors and mostly funded by governments or private grants. These journals are just mooching off the whole thing.
> and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless
Not at all, but, they will review a lot more of them before deciding which ones to cite if sci-hub is available. BTW arxiv is for physics math and cs, while the closed access problem is mainly affecting life sciences which don't use arxiv, and are only partially using biorxiv / medrxiv. There's still a very archaic culture there, mainly because there's no other easy way to ascertain some scientists' value.
Keep in mind, in math and other hard sciences it is not uncommon to cite 50 year old papers which are still highly relevant today (which is less common in biology). Such papers are often behind publisher paywalls since they predate arXiv. So closed access is very much a problem in these fields too.
indeed. it happens in life sciences too, but it's usually classic historic papers that everybody cites but nobody reads. In fact i have been completely unable to find some of the most cited works of e.g. Ramon y Cajal from the 1900s.
> People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless
What? Will they reject your paper if you don't present a receipt you paid to access it? I published two articles in Physical Review Journals, virtually all papers I cited came from Sci-Hub.
> Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it
Scientists won't get a penny of the money you're paying, BTW. It makes no sense to compare it to books.
You did not support anyone's hard work. The researchers who wrote the paper receive none of the money paid to publishing companies, nor do the peer reviewers, and sometimes not even the editors (and in my experience, paid editors from Springer introduce more errors than they fix).
Before the Internet, before TeX and related tools, those fees were needed to cover the cost of printing copies journals and shipping them to libraries. Prior to the 1970s academic publishers were typically run by universities and charged only break-even fees, and few complained because there was no better alternative that could effectively spread academic research around. Then a bunch of commercial publishers began eyeing academic journals (probably because they knew they would never have to pay the authors) and from the 1980s onward academic publishing has been for-profit. Instead of going away when the Internet rendered printed journals obsolete, these companies have instead opted to not print most journals and charge fees for online access.
The cost of journal access does not in any way pay for the research itself, and neither the researchers nor the peer reviewers ever see a dime. It is money which is stolen from science and from the public.
That is like the most clueless comment on that topic ever. You are either trolling or working for one of the publishers ;-)
a) Of course people who need to read the paper professionally will just pirate it (if they don't have access through their institution). After all, citing a paper doesn't imply that you "own" it.
* Not that long ago people's sole access to papers was through insanely expensive journals, with prices that are absolutely unthinkable for a large portion of the world's population.
* Arxiv sort of changed that and a lot of information is widely accessible, granted you don't live in a country with high amounts of censorship.
* On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy affects the overall situation very little. People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies and so on.
* On a personal note, I don't recall using anything other than Arxiv for the past 8-9 years or so with the exception of one notable example involving a medical paper which was published in another location and it wasn't free. That said I purchased it, even if it set me back around 250 euros iirc. It wasn't work related in any shape or form, it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the authors published for free online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.