[Emptyskin]

I'm of the opinion that scientific papers should be available online and that JSTOR et al are no longer necessary and acting only as gatekeepers that exploit researchers and authors for the benefit of their copyright licensing schemes.

I would support the piracy of academic journals, UP books (I've gotten some that are still in need of corrections and edits =P), and even raw data used for research purposes. I feel this way simply because the internet allows for it.

The internet has demonstrated that the cost of distributing digital goods reflects, not the cost of production (which has never actually been true), but the cost of distribution. You can download, copy and redistribute a file all over the world in a few seconds costing you only pennies (in terms of your ISP fees and electricity). The economic benefits of this are massive.

Remember when you spent $15 on a CD? Today you don't have to spend anything (again, other than ISP fees for access) to get what was on that CD. No resources are spent creating the physical CDs in the first place. Many say that the content creators will not get money and will not be incentivized to continue to create it. My response: Isn't that a better scenario? Doesn't that decentralize the production capital for those goods? Won't that limit the creation of new [research, art, music, digital good] to those that are dedicated to it? Think if movies, music, and tv were only created by the people who care about the content and who are not holding up administrators and executives on their shoulders.

If someone is poor, but brilliant (or merely in a second world country) they might never have access to the insane amount of information that is on the internet, even if it is simply locked behind closed doors at JSTOR. This creates a barrier of entry into the field of knowledge production that is inhumane.

Piracy is a word that is meant to be pejorative, but has the same definition as "sharing." Some claim that file-sharing is theft or stealing, but this assumes that the owner loses the utility of the object when it is shared. This is not true. If I steal your bicycle then you cannot ride it or sell it. I deprive you of the utility. But if I download your mp3 it does not stop you from listening to it or selling it to someone else.

Academics are, for the most part, pedantic and, from what I can tell here, not all that concerned with the welfare of humanity if, or when, it encroaches on your short term fiduciary situations. We need to look for methods of disassembling JSTOR and distributing it's responsibility out to different institutions that have knowledge creation in mind before they have the well being of JSTOR and the administrators in mind.

Aaron Swartz held convictions similar to these and was on the front lines of fighting this system. The battle is just beginning and there are no defenses against the propensity of the internet to reconstruct our economy along the lines of what can be created and disseminated and what cannot. Bread cannot be copied and sent to all of the hungry people in the world through the internet, but information, abstractly, can be. Every penny that is not spent on a digital good on the internet is a penny that could better yours or someone else's life off the internet.

Let's rethink accessibility.

[Istanbuller]

As someone who has a degree from Social Sciences, i oppose free access to academic papers in our fields. The internet is a scam and we shouldn't fall into this. If someone wants to read about Social Sciences, then he or she must buy a book for himself/ herself. There shouldn't be another way around.

But my stance is very different on Natural Sciences papers. All these papers should be available on the internet and should never be restricted.

From my perspective, Natural Sciences/ Computer and electronic fields can be learnt without school. It's not really an academia.

[Solastalgia]

I would say that I support open access for the most part. Although, I sympathize with the sentiments of Jaron Lanier, that it can be somewhat fetishized by people. I mean, sure have free open access to everything, but who controls the data flow at the end of the day? Who's making money off of you sharing? These are the kind of questions we need to ask. It's one thing to have open access to academic journals, but it's another to push this phantasmal "californian ideology".

[Emptyskin]

I mean, sure have free open access to everything, but who controls the data flow at the end of the day?

The ISPs control data in an ultimate way.

Who's making money off of you sharing?

This depends on what perspective you take. The ISPs benefit from data flows of any kind. However, data flows are not my immediate concern. That would be a problem down the road, after some significant strides had already been made. The immediate problem is that of the licensing structure and copyrights. Using certain clients, like bittorrent, ONLY the ISPs make money off of file-sharing and no one controls the information.

I am unfamiliar with the Californian ideology. My statements should not be construed as being affiliated with it in any way.

@ Istanbuller

The distinction you make seems arbitrary. It is unclear how one could teach themselves physics, but not economics. The internet is not a scam. Copyrights in the age of the internet is a scam.

[ThereBeDragons]

Well, journals want revenue, and therefore they don't want to distribute their content for free, so they don't. Open-access journals fund themselves by charging for publication. And therefore some people don't want to publish there. At the end of the day it's about money.

Copyrights in the age of the internet is a scam.

How is it any more legitimate today than it was before? Just because you can commit copyright violation for cheaper?

[Emptyskin]

At the end of the day it's about money.

Yes, very insightful.

How is it any more legitimate today than it was before? Just because you can commit copyright violation for cheaper?

Who said it was before? Every new technology has run into the same problem of accusations of 'illegal' distribution becoming possible. Hollywood fought home video devices on these grounds. Informational gatekeepers want to control the distribution of information regardless, it appears, of time and space.

[Harmattan]

Since one or two decades the situation became unsustainable anyway: the subscription fees increased quickly and many university libraries and laboratories cannot cope with them any longer. Which is very shocking considering the incredible profit margins that editors like Elsevier make. Whether you support a paywall model or not, as long as you know the situation you can only see it as an abuse of their economic positions which is detrimental to innovation and morally incompatible with the public funding of many researches.

Besides the existence of those central journals is a weak point: there are incestuous relations between some journals and private companies, and in some other cases some companies managed to censor articles by threatening to no longer publish anything in the journals that would refuse to cope.


Nevertheless I am not in a hurry to destroy the existence of peer-reviewed, commercial, publications as they do bring something significant. Yet I do not think that it should be the only way to publish and measure research activity, and at the very least articles should end up in public sight some time after their publication.

Besides we should not neglect how the standardized article format is a nuisance to efficiently convey ideas and results, and contributes to this feeling of so many empty research articles. The web offers many more efficient ways to convey ideas and present data.

From my perspective, Natural Sciences/ Computer and electronic fields can be learnt without school.

Any knowledge can be learned outside of school. The whole academic model is outdated and I skipped as many courses as I was allowed to in my higher education, despite getting excellent marks. Currently the only real benefits of schools are certification, maturation and networking, but they do a very poor job at training and teaching, which is supposed to be their primary benefit. Leave knowledge to books and raw knowledge evaluation to computers, and let teachers focus on critical thinking/experimentation in very small discussion groups, and on the evaluation of student's individualized works.

It's not really an academia.

The Cambridge dictionary defines an "academia" as "the part of society, especially universities, that is connected with studying and thinking, or the activity or job of studying." I fail to see why natural sciences, or a part of them, could not qualified as such.

Besides, if your vision of academia is some autonomous and endogenous group living in university whose production should be reserved to this very academia, then why the hell should it get public funding? The existence of an academia is only justified by how it interacts with the rest of the society.

[ThereBeDragons]

Who said it was before? Every new technology has run into the same problem of accusations of 'illegal' distribution becoming possible. Hollywood fought home video devices on these grounds. Informational gatekeepers want to control the distribution of information regardless, it appears, of time and space.

It has been possible to illegally mass distribute copyrighted material since the invention of the printing press.

If copyright is fundamentally bullshit now, then it was also fundamentally bullshit then.

[Harmattan]

If copyright is fundamentally bullshit now, then it was also fundamentally bullshit then.

I am not a proponent of the copyright abolition, but I think that your analysis is wrong: before the Internet mass distribution was only feasible through commercial means (or at least through of an economically structured context involving several commercial actors). You needed mass investments to produce the copies, and then you needed to enter commercial mass distribution circuits to diffuse them. In other words, what changed is that distribution is now available outside of a context commercial. Providing copies to millions of people is mostly free.

Now look at History: before Gutenberg there was no copyright. But then the society found itself with commercial circuits redistributing copies of works and making profits over those. Those circuits were legally exploiting authors' works without remunerating them. It then looked fair to grant the authors commercial rights so that they could claim a share of those profits. Therefore copyright did not exist despite the possibility of mass distribution but *because* of the very existence of a commercial mass distribution. In other words, the idea of copyright has been historically coupled with the idea of a fair remuneration of profits. But what happens when there are no profits? Historically, in many countries, individual sharing/reproduction was legal. And many piracy's proponents advocate, not without legal ground, that it should extend to peer-to-peer.

Again I am not saying that copyright must be abolished or so (I have no defined position as all possible outcomes look bad to me). And I am not ignorant that piracy is mostly performed within a commercial context (although this is also the result of the repression against pirate websites, which discourages amateurs). I am simply arguing that, no, it's not the same as before, to the point that the historical foundations often do not apply.

[ThirdTerm]

JSTOR has started a new service for non-subscribers and some academic articles on JSTOR are now open to non-university students who do not have direct access to the network. Google Scholar is also a powerful tool and if you look around on the site, you will eventually find full-text articles or PDF files available for download except for some very recent papers. Oxford journals and other periodicals such as Nature also now have items freely accessible for everyone. Academic articles are somewhat similar to music CDs, by which authors and publishing companies make a profit, and copyright laws need to be respected in the academic publishing industry as well.

Kurds are traditionally regarded as Iranians and of Iranian origin, and therefore as Indo-Europeans, mainly, because they speak Iranian. This hypothesis is largely based on linguistic considerations and was predominantly developed by linguists. In contrast to such believes, newest DNA-research of advanced Human Anthropology indicates, that in earliest traceable origins, forefathers of Kurds were obviously descendants of indigenous (first) Neolithic Northern Fertile Crescent aborigines, geographically mainly from outside and northwest of what is Iran of today in Near East and Eurasia. Oldest ancestral forefathers of Kurds were millennia later linguistically Iranianized in several waves by militarily organized elites of (R1a1) immigrants from Central Asia. These new findings lead to the understanding, that neither were aborigine Northern Fertile Crescent Eurasian Kurds and ancient Old-Iranian speaker (R1a1) immigrants from Asia one and the same people, nor represent the later, R1a1 dominated migrating early Old-Iranian-speaker elites from Asia, oldest traceable ancestors of Kurds. Rather, constitute both historically completely different populations and layers of Kurdish forefathers, each with own distinct genetic, ethnical, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. These new insights indicate first inter-disciplinary findings in co-op- eration with two international leading experts in their disciplines, Iranologist Gernot L. Windfuhr, Ann Arbor, and DNA Genealogist Anatole A. Klyosov, Boston, USA.
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=19564#.U_fTlvmSxMU