The EFF endorses piracy? This is like the internet archive library giving unlimited access to books without authorization for "emergency access" during covid.
Generally, almost nobody cares about IP infringement, but in the case of academic papers it's even worse. Even the authors and the peer reviewers of the work don't care about it 99% of the time. They don't see a single cent from the publication that's charging you $1000 per month to access their work.
Scihub saves you from finding the email address of one of the authors and waiting for a reply for your request for a copy of the paper.
I'd be surprised and disappointed if a party like the EFF would be against free access to scientific knowledge. That includes educational books on the Internet Archive.
It's important to have both running in parallel. The more that Sci-Hub becomes normalized, the more people wonder why it's illegal in the first place. When you have a pirate site which the content creators themselves endorse and use, it really serves to highlight how broken the existing academic IP system is.
> It's possible to support and encourage free access to scientific knowledge while not supporting IP infringement.
Not even theoretically. IP is the concept that people should be prevented from reading things without negotiating with the people who own them. So "free access" quite obviously requires that future "scientific knowledge" be excluded from IP protection, and that people who already own "scientific knowledge" be compelled and/or bribed into relinquishing their ownership.
And to expand, those options would also require the government to define what is "scientific knowledge" and what is not. Or else, I could just call my paper a satire and Elsevier could become a publisher of satires.
I don't think so. You can support free access to knowledge through means other than IP infringement. For example, advocating for open access policies. Many publishers agreements allow authors to post a version of the same publication on their personal website. Making that process easier and indexing those results to make it easier to find freely available versions of published work is another way to encourage access.
It seems I did misunderstand. In that case, my answer would be that I think you can support both IP infringement and free and open access to scientific knowledge even if that is not my personal position.
I don’t think anyone would argue you can’t do both. But it does seem that people in this thread are arguing that you can further free and and open access knowledge more effectively by disregarding the potential copyright infringement. If someone feels that by disregarding the potential lawlessness, they are able to do more good overall, would you consider it unreasonable for that person to support a project like scihub?
I don’t think it’s “dictating morality” in so far as “seeing the big picture”. If your goal is to spread knowledge as effectively as possible, why limit yourself by the very rules working against you? I mean I can understand self-preservation but what else? The laws in question aren’t really about morality anyway.
> If your goal is to spread knowledge as effectively as possible, why limit yourself by the very rules working against you?
This is assuming that spreading knowledge as effectively as possible is the only goal. Even if you take a utilitarian approach to ethics, I doubt anyone has this as their only goal.
> The laws in question aren’t really about morality anyway.
I think what is and isn't related to morality is at least somewhat subjective.
Legality and ethics are often disjoint, and for many people Sci-Hub is pretty clearly a case where piracy is the ethical thing to do.
My personal opinion is this: tax dollars pay for a huge proportion of the research that is then reviewed by volunteers (whose pay also comes out of taxes) and then published in journals that charge insane prices to host a PDF of this taxpayer-funded research. Sci-Hub takes this publicly-funded research and makes it available to the public like it always should have been.
At least in the US, all government-funded research will be required to be freely available immediately starting in 2026. It's unclear what the overall impact will be. Certainly this access is a good thing, but it's unclear how publishers will respond.
It's possible authors might be forced to pay publishing fees for open access, which would then inflate grant budgets (since this only applies to government research, this means the taxpayer is footing the bill). They may choose to be open access by default, in which case, another source of revenue will be necessary. Part of the challenge is that for many academics, it's necessary for advancement to publish in prestigious venues which are not always open access.
I can't figure out why in 2023 running a journal costs very much money at all. The authors are paid by someone else, the peer reviewers are paid by someone else, and an online-only journal would be completely acceptable today. What other overhead do these publications have?
Limiting to online-only journals (which is already the case with many journals), there's still editors, administrative staff, and hosting costs. I'm sure many would argue (and I would agree) that this shouldn't require exorbitant sums of money.
However, some money is still required and I'm not sure where this would come from aside from funds collected from either authors or consumers (institutional or otherwise). I'm not saying the model we have is the only possible model, just that I don't think there's an obvious alternative that solves all the various aspects of the problem.
I’ve had colleagues who have published in high impact journals ask me to grab a copy of their own work from scihub since they couldn’t access it themselves. Of course, they have the manuscripts themselves but they just wanted the published format.
Endorsement is not the same as performance. I endorse peoples' right to use drugs or put obscene bumper stickers on their car. Doesn't mean I do the same.
I make all my research outputs publicly accessible wherever legally possible. Any of my published work that is behind a publisher paywall is also available for free and should be pretty easy to find. I personally disapprove of Sci-Hub's approach of piracy, but I can understand the utility. I also believe I'm likely in the minority here.
