I think it's the same reason that excessive bold or ALL CAPS are not enjoyed by most: it's a distraction. Instead of focusing on the content of what is being written. I think icons, just like bold or CAPS, can be used in situations where it adds value (formatting pun intended) - but often times it's poorly used and distracting.
The latter deprives someone of an item, the former increases its availability. An important distinction when considering the purpose and goals of Sci-Hub.
It’s depriving journals from money they could make from publications when they have already charged the authors to publish them.
There is no moral dilemma here : accessing an article thru Sci-Hub deprives nobody from getting its due money. Scientists unfortunately continues not being paid for the paper, journals continues being paid by universities to review the paper, but nobody wants to pay just to read a paper from the journal when it already has been paid for.
No, I disagree on the fact that they are « publishers » at all. Reviewers, for sure, and they still get paid for that.
But being a publisher means being an intermediate between the author and the reader, which they are not since when I buy the right to read a publication, 0% of my money goes to author.
And even, I could be ok to pay them to compensate access fees (lol !) but I prefer using their concurrent (Sci-Hub)
I call this a mafia. The fact it is legal don’t change my view on it.
It's not depriving authors or the reviewers of money, since they don't get any money anyway from publishers or readers. It is depriving publishers of money by replacing them, doing the same thing they do (intermediary between author+reviewer and reader) better and cheaper i.e. for free - but that's essentially just outcompeting them in their own business. Copyright is there to protect incentives for authors, but it should not grant an artificial monopoly to useless middlemen.
For these publishers, that's a welcome side effect. Having a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves and their shareholders, is not how this should work at all.
Also, many users of Sci-Hub would not be able to afford the publishers' access fees anyway. The alternative, if Sci-Hub is destroyed, isn't the publishers getting loads more cash rolling in, it's such users not being able to access these research papers at all.
> Ms. Elbakyan attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter when she learned of an article on my site that describes several methods to acquire free copies of scientific articles,
Thanks for digging that up, I appreciate it; I didn’t think of looking in the Archive.
We’ll have to disagree about whether her reaction was hysterical. She called my article “ridiculous” and compared it to recommending that people use horse-and-buggy transportation. I was pretty mystified by the tenor of her remarks. One of my points was that Sci-Hub could become unavailable, either globally or locally, so it’s good to know about other ways to get one’s hands on articles. Just mentioning alternatives was offensive to her. We see now that this was not an unrealistic consideration.
EDIT: It’s not ideal to add to your comments using the edit button without marking them as edits. Let me reply to your last sentence by saying I do not think it is sexist to use the word “hysterical”, which has a well-understood meaning apart from its etymology, to someone who happens to be female. In fact, I think it would be very silly to police one’s speech in this way.
> Let me reply to your last sentence by saying I do not think it is sexist to use the word “hysterical”, which has a well-understood meaning apart from its etymology, to someone who happens to be female.
Then do you think maybe you misread Elbakyan's tone from her word choices, in a similar way to how I misread yours? She even stated in her last reply that she wasn't being hostile.
Where is that "uncontrolled extreme emotion" in her words, that you refer to? All I see is some guy who is still hurt almost a year after someone disagreed with him on Twitter. I can't imagine Alexandra has any sleepless nights over this, you may want to reflect on who is the "hysterical" party in your story.
Calling women who politely contradict you “hysterical” is sexist, full stop. When you inadvertently use offensive prejudiced language out of ignorance, and people point that out, the appropriate action is to apologize and try not to do it again, not start making excuses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria
Honestly, this seems to be a cultural thing. Having been exposed to both Russians and Americans, I would never dare use those words in a disagreement with American colleague, for example. But talking to a Russian one, I would use much harder ones for my point to be taken seriously, and would not have expected any bad blood over it.
Well, then I hope I’m wrong about the vehemence behind her remarks. But I’m still puzzled about the reason for her objections in the first place. What’s so wrong about mentioning that there are some ways to get reprints besides Sci-Hub?
Not only should there should be no autonomous drones, the non-autonomous remote controller hardware should be wired up such that if they are shot out of the sky, this kills the human operator and anyone sitting nearby.
This would be much fairer than the current system of gamified point-and-click murder.
I'm pretty sure any artificial rules which make war "fairer" will just be ignored when real bullets start flying since "it's better to be judged by twelve than to be carried by six" is an actual unofficial rule in the military.
As horrible as this sounds, I like the "real world consequence" part of it. Maybe this would lead to people reconsidering their participation in those war games.
I'm British and not part of that 60%, and am fervently hoping this support declines more rapidly when the current monarch dies in the next few years or so. I think a lot of the respect for the monarchy here is driven by a personal respect for the Queen. The rest being our deep-seated cultural problem of class deference.
My personal opinion is that in addition to abolishing the monarchy, the state should seize all of their private assets, and every member of the royal family should be exiled. This is probably an even less popular opinion, but I think it's the only proper way to rid Britain of this parasitic family.
> Are any of the 60% around that could explain their thoughts?
If you ask a monarchist, they'll usually lean on one of two arguments: the financial and the traditional.
The former is the flawed belief that the monarchy is a money-maker for the UK and that it would be financially imprudent to abolish them. Usually this argument is based on the Crown Estate providing income for the Treasury, and the implied assumption that if the monarchy were abolished then that income would be gone, even though the lands are still there and there's no reason why the new republican government couldn't just seize the Estate as part of this abolishment. There's also the tourism income conjecture, but plenty of ex-monarchies have a strong tourism sector, and presumably there'd be a Royal Family Museum for tourists to visit in the new republic.
The latter is driven by cultural inertia and tends to be what monarchists lean on when the financial argument has been demolished. The talking points usually revolve around who would be the next head of state then, how could Britain possibly function without the monarchy, and so on.
Perhaps some monarchists would disagree with this characterisation of their beliefs, but having argued with many of them, these are my observations.
This supposed 'intellectual property theft' is mostly just reverse engineering of technology.
It's not really a problem anyway. If some capitalists in the US and Europe don't get to skim off a slice of profit from another country's manufacturing output, then so what?
The fact that this is a VC-backed startup pretty much guarantees it will be doing nefarious things with its users' data somewhere down the line. Even if not intended right now.
Either a business can thrive without selling user data, or it can’t. If it can’t, then eventually the data will fall in the hands of someone willing to sell it. It doesn’t matter if that someone is current management (perhaps under pressure from VCs) or future management (after inevitable acquisition or asset liquidation since the business is not viable).
Therefore it does not matter how current management feels about selling user data today, or whether they are vc-funded or bootstrapped. If they aren’t building a viable business, the data they are collecting will be sold eventually.
