nature – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Sci-Hub's Creator Thinks Academic Publishers, Not Her Site, Are The Real Threat To Science, And Says: 'Any Law Against Knowledge Is Fundamentally Unjust'

from the put-up-or-shut-up dept

A year ago, Techdirt wrote about an important lawsuit in India, brought by the academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen. A couple of factors make this particular legal action different from previous attempts to shut down these sites. First, an Indian court ruled in 2016 that photocopying textbooks for educational purposes is fair use; the parallels with SciHub, which provides free access to copies of academic papers for students and researchers who might not otherwise be able to afford the high subscription fees, are clear. Secondly, the person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, is fighting, rather than ignoring, the case, as she has done on previous occasions.

One manifestation of her new pro-active approach is a tweet she posted recently. It included a screenshot of an email she wrote to Nature magazine, which had contacted her about a forthcoming article on the Indian court case. Following standard practice, the journalist writing the article, Holly Else, asked Elbakyan to comment on some of the accusations the academic publishers had made against Sci-Hub. Her responses are fascinating, not least because they provide Elbakyan’s perspective on several important issues.

For example, according to the publishers’ comments as transmitted by Else, “Pirate sites like Sci-Hub threaten the integrity of the scientific record, and the safety of university and personal data”. In reply, Elbakyan points out Sci-Hub is unique, and the use of the phrase “Pirate sites like Sci-Hub” is a clever attempt to lump Sci-Hub in with quite different sites, thus prejudging the legality of its activities. Elbakyan says that it’s academic publishers — not Sci-Hub — which threaten the progress of science:

open communication is [a] fundamental property of science and it makes scientific progress possible. Paywalled access prevents this and is a great threat to science. Also the great threat is also when the whole scientific knowledge became the private property of some corporation such as Elsevier, that has full control of it. That is the threat, not Sci-Hub.

Elbakyan points out that Sci-Hub doesn’t threaten the “integrity of the scientific record”, since she simply disseminates copies of the academic papers without changing them in any way. But perhaps the most interesting part of her reply concerns the accusation that Sci-Hub threatens the safety of university and personal data. Techdirt has written previously about claims that Elbakyan allegedly has links to Russian intelligence, and that Sci-Hub is some kind of security risk. According to Else, the publishers assert:

Pirate sites like Sci-Hub compromise the security of libraries and higher education institutions to gain unauthorized access to scientific databases and other proprietary intellectual property, and illegally harvest journal articles and e-books.

Sci-Hub uses stolen user credentials and phishing attack to extract copyrighted articles illegally

These are serious allegations, and ones that have been made several times in the past. Elbakyan’s response is probably the first time that she has addressed them directly:

Do they have any actual case when Sci-Hub somehow compromised the security of any library or a person? Any person that complained about credentials that were ‘stolen’ from them? Or is it again, nothing more than empty accusations. Nobody is complaining about ‘compromised security’ except academic publishers.

In other words, it is time for Elbakyan’s accusers to put up or shut up. She concludes by stating that “Any law against knowledge is fundamentally unjust”, and hopes that “Nature will have enough honesty to publish my comments in full.

It didn’t, of course.

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Filed Under: academic journals, academic research, alexandra elbakyan, copyright, education, holly else, india, publishers, security
Companies: nature, sci-hub

Thousands Of Academics Pledge To Boycott Springer's New Machine Learning Title In Support Of Long-Established Open Access Journal

from the if-it-ain't-broke,-and-it's-free,-don't-fix-it dept

Among Techdirt’s many stories chronicling the (slow) rise of open access publishing, a number have been about dramatic action taken by researchers to protest against traditional publishers and their exploitative business model. For example, in 2012, a boycott of the leading publisher Elsevier was organized to protest against its high journal prices and its support for the now long-forgotten Research Works Act. In 2015, the editors and editorial board of the Elsevier title Lingua resigned in order to start up their own open access journal. Now we have another boycott, this time as a reaction against the launch of the for-profit Nature Machine Intelligence, from the German publishing giant Springer. Thousands of academics in the field have added their names to a statement about the new title expressing their concerns:

the following list of researchers hereby state that they will not submit to, review, or edit for this new journal.

We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine learning research and believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine learning community would be a retrograde step. In contrast, we would welcome new zero-cost open access journals and conferences in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The contact person for the statement is Thomas G. Dietterich, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) and Director of Intelligent Systems at Oregon State University. He has a long history of supporting open access. In 2001, he was one of 40 signatories to another statement. It announced their resignation from the editorial board of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ), which was not open access, and their support for the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), launched in 2000, which was open access. As they wrote:

our resignation from the editorial board of MLJ reflects our belief that journals should principally serve the needs of the intellectual community, in particular by providing the immediate and universal access to journal articles that modern technology supports, and doing so at a cost that excludes no one. We are excited about JMLR, which provides this access and does so unconditionally. We feel that JMLR provides an ideal vehicle to support the near-term and long-term evolution of the field of machine learning and to serve as the flagship journal for the field.

That confidence seems to have been justified. JMLR is now up to its 18th volume, and is flourishing. It is “zero cost” open access — it makes no charge either to read or to be published if a paper is accepted by the editors. The last thing this minimalist operation needs is a rival title from a well-funded publisher able to pour money into its new launch in order to attract authors and take over the market. Hence the current boycott of Nature Machine Intelligence, and the call for “new zero-cost open access journals and conferences in artificial intelligence and machine learning” instead.

As to why Springer decided to announce a competitor to a well-established, and well-respected journal, an article in The Next Web points out that the German publishing company is about to offer shares worth up to €1.6 billion (around $1.95 billion) in its imminent IPO. A new journal covering the super-hot areas of AI, machine learning and robotics is just the sort of thing to help give the share price a boost. And when there’s serious money to be made, who cares about the collateral damage to a much-loved open access title running on a shoestring?

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Filed Under: academics, knowledge, machine learning, nature, open access, research
Companies: nature, springer

Nature Drops Its Paywall… But Replaces It With Insane, Anti-Research Proprietary DRM

from the screw-you,-researchers dept

We’ve written plenty about open access and how the big scientific journals profit off of publicly funded research by putting it behind a paywall, thereby greatly limiting the ability of knowledge (often paid for with our tax dollars) to be used to further discovery, research and innovation. The impact on society is tremendous, and unfortunate.

In the science realm, there are two “big” journal publishers: Nature and Science. If you’re an academic releasing a scientific paper, those tend to be the two journals you most want your papers to appear in. So, it seemed like good news when Nature claimed it was moving away from a paywall and going to allow open access to the research papers it publishes. But the details suggest that whoever came up with this plan did it for the stupidest of reasons. Nature’s own report on this change of plans kicks off by highlighting how ridiculously limited and encumbered with DRM this new offering will be:

All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal?s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.

Well, even that’s an exaggeration. The full press release notes that it’s not that everything will be “free to read” but rather that those who do subscribe will be able to freely “share” the works (in this annoying, limited, proprietary DRM manner). Also “100 media outlets and blogs” will be given access as well, so that they can also share the works in this annoying, limited proprietary way:

Subscribers to 49 journals on nature.com will be able to share a unique URL to a full text, read-only version of published scientific research with colleagues or collaborators in the most convenient way for them, e.g. via email and social media. Included are the world’s most cited scientific publication, Nature; the Nature family of journals and fifteen other quality science journals. This new initiative will be available to scientists and students at more than 6,000 universities and organizations worldwide, and serve the more 10 million monthly unique visitors to nature.com. This sharing is intended for personal, non-commercial use. To further aid collaboration, forthcoming annotation functionality will enable subscribers to share comments and highlighted text with their colleagues.

100 media outlets and blogs across the globe that report on the findings of articles published on nature.com will be able to provide their own readers with a link to a full text, read-only view of the original scientific paper. Thousands of high-quality scientific papers will be available. Nature has published some of the leading scientific stories of our time, such as the Human Genome; the structure of DNA; Dolly the Sheep; the invention of the laser; the identification of the AIDS virus and the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer.

Is this more open than the full paywall? Sure. But, it’s such a hamfisted way of “opening up” that it makes things even more annoying. If you can’t download, copy or print the text — and you have to install annoying proprietary software — it makes it a hell of a lot harder for researchers to actually make use of the text to, you know, contribute to their own research. Of course, the announcement also notes that Nature’s owner, Macmillan, just happens to have a “majority investment” in ReadCube, the proprietary DRM platform that the company is using.

In other words, this has little to do with true open access. Instead, it’s a rather cynical attempt to pretend to be open access, while trying to pump up its own investment in some crappy DRM system. So, sure, kudos for taking a layer off the top of the paywall, but this is hardly a revolutionary step. It still seems very much designed to make it as annoying and inconvenient as possible to actually share knowledge. I mean, this is the very same Nature that, just months ago, was trying to pressure researchers from universities that had open access policies to get those universities to waive those policies when seeking to get published in Nature…

Filed Under: copying, copyright, drm, journals, nature, paywall, readcube, research, science, scientists
Companies: macmillan, nature

Do Nature's Publishers Even Read Their Own Articles About Open Access?

from the funny-that dept

Just a few weeks ago we wrote about scientific publishing giant Nature’s somewhat abhorrent open access policy, where it’s telling researchers at universities that require open access publishing that they need to get a waiver from that policy. So it seems rather strange to see that very same Nature, just days later, publishing an article about open access, in which it talks about how two of the largest funders of scientific research today, Wellcome Trust in the UK and the National Institute for Health (NIH) in the US, are starting to punish grant recipients who don’t follow through on open access obligations. Both of those organizations require certain open access standards, but apparently have mostly just trusted researchers to follow through. Not any more:

Now they are done with just dangling carrots. Both institutions are bringing out the sticks: cautiously and discreetly cracking down on researchers who do not make their papers publicly available.

Neither agency would name those who have been sanctioned. But the London-based Wellcome Trust says that it has withheld grant payments on 63 occasions in the past year because papers resulting from the funding were not open access. And the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, says that it has delayed some continuing grant awards since July 2013 because of non-compliance with open-access policies, although the agency does not know the exact numbers.

The report notes that this has resulted in a “noticeable jump in researchers following the rules.” That makes sense.

Of course, nowhere in the Nature article does reporter Richard Van Noorden ever bother to mention that his own publication is fighting against those requirements. In fact, the article reads as if it’s a strong supporter of open access rules:

Some scientists are not even aware that they could be penalized. Nature‘s news team contacted Sheila MacNeil, a tissue engineer at the University of Sheffield, UK, who has published hundreds of articles, including a March 2013 paper on making stem-cell lattices for corneal repair that was funded by the Wellcome Trust (I. Ortega et al. Acta Biomater. 9, 5511–5520; 2013). Nature pointed out that the article should be open access but is not. “This is new to me,” responds MacNeil, who plans to make the paper available. “Agreeing with open access is easy — making it happen, less so,” she says.

Perhaps the Nature “news team” should take a look at how their own publisher is forcing researchers to ignore their open access obligations.

Filed Under: nih, open access, publishing
Companies: nature, wellcome trust