Thanks for sending. Enjoyed reading about history of sci-hub,, libgen, and other information access efforts. Guess we are starting to see something similar with pre-prints (at least in my field, psychology; think they've been around for a while in other fields). Know one academic that exclusively reads pre-prints. I've had some classes that read a good amount of pre-prints in addition to standard pubs. Econ has culture (or so I've been told) of posting papers to pre-print server and discussing for a while before pub; formal journal pub ends up just a formality because people already aware of paper. In psych, we've had one recommendation in a journal pub to switch to something like that. Different cultures than simply accessing information but similar idea of getting around publishers
On Sat, Jul 14, 2018 at 3:00 AM, <nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org> wrote: > Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to > nettime-l@mail.kein.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Shadow libraries in the Washington Post (tbyfield) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 10:38:12 -0400 > From: tbyfield <tbyfi...@panix.com> > To: Nettime-l <nettim...@kein.org> > Subject: <nettime> Shadow libraries in the Washington Post > Message-ID: <abafc59d-fe08-4ca9-93eb-b53876d3a...@panix.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed > > What a pleasant thing to see this morning ? a razor-sharp overview by > Joe Karaganis and Balazs Bodo. In the Washington Post, no less. > > Cheers, > T > > < > https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/ > 07/13/russia-is-building-a-new-napster-but-for-academic-research/ > > > > Russia is building a new Napster -- but for academic research > > By Joe Karaganis and Balazs Bodo > > July 13 at 7:00 AM > > > What will future historians will see as the major Russian contribution > to early 21st-century Internet culture? It might not be troll farms and > other strategies for poisoning public conversation -- but rather, the > democratization of access to scientific and scholarly knowledge. Over > the last decade, Russian academics and activists have built free, > remarkably comprehensive online archives of scholarly works. What > Napster was to music, the Russian shadow libraries are to knowledge. > > Much of the current attention to these libraries focuses on Sci-Hub, a > huge online library created by Kazakhstan-based graduate student > Aleksandra Elbakyan. Started in 2011, Sci-Hub has made freely available > an archive of over 60 million articles, drawn primarily from paywalled > databases of major scientific publishers. Its audience is massive and > global. In 2017, the service provided nearly 200 million downloads. > Because most scholars in high-income countries already have paid access > to the major research databases through their university libraries, its > main beneficiaries are students and faculty from middle- and low-income > countries, who frequently do not. > > Such underground flows of knowledge from more- to less-privileged > universities are not new. But they used to depend on slower and > less-reliable networks, such as developing-world students and faculty > traveling to and from Western universities, bringing back photocopies > and later hard drives full of scholarly work. Sci-Hub scaled this > process up to meet the demand of an increasingly interconnected global > scientific community, where the first barrier to participation was > access to research. > > Why Russia? > > Academic copying and sharing has created shadow libraries all over the > world. But only the Russian versions have grown into large-scale global > libraries. This was not an accident. From the 1960s on, Russian > intellectual life depended heavily on clandestine copying and > distribution of texts -- on the "samizdat" networks that distributed > uncensored literature and news. The fall of communism ended censorship. > But it also left Russian readers, libraries and publishers impoverished, > trading political constraints for economic ones. > > The arrival of cheap scanners and computers fueled the growth of new > self-organized libraries. By the second half of the 1990s, the Russian > Internet -- RuNet -- was awash in book digitization projects run by > intellectuals, activists and other bibliophiles. Texts migrated from > print to digital and sometimes back again. Efforts to consolidate these > projects also sprung up by the dozens. Such digital librarianship was > the antithesis of official Soviet book culture, as it was free, > bottom-up, democratic and uncensored. It also provided a modicum of > cultural agency to Russian intellectuals amid the economic ruin of the > 1990s. > > The big Russian shadow libraries emerged from this mix of clandestine > librarianship, economic crisis, technological change and -- at the state > level -- regulatory incapacity. By the early 2000s, these shadow > librarians had digitized much of the highest-value Russian scientific > and literary work. By the mid 2000s, the largest of these efforts had > consolidated into an archive called Library Genesis, or LibGen. > > LibGen equated survival with redundancy, and so made both its collection > and its software available to others. Almost anyone could clone the > library, and many did. By the late 2000s, the most prominent was the > Gigapedia (later called Library.nu), which began to build a large > English-language collection. When a copyright lawsuit by Western > publishers took down the Gigapedia in 2012, its collection was > re-assimilated into LibGen. > > Sci-Hub was built around similar principles. When a user requested an > article, Sci-Hub automatically downloaded that article from publisher > databases, using borrowed faculty credentials. Sci-Hub then archived the > article with LibGen, to fulfill any subsequent requests. > > Now, Sci-Hub has its own archive, and LibGen serves as a backup. > According to Elbakyan, the complete archive has been copied many times. > > But what about the legal implications? > > Much of this activity violates U.S. and international copyright law. In > June 2017, a New York district court awarded $15 million to Elsevier, > one of the handful of publishers that control most of the world's > academic journals, in its lawsuit against Sci-Hub and LibGen. This > hasn't stopped either service. But the legal pressure has forced Sci-Hub > to periodically change hosting services and access methods. None of the > LibGen administrators are named in the suit, but Elbakyan could face > criminal charges if she travels to the United States. > > All this has amplified academia's ongoing and intensifying debate about > publishing ethics. Many academics regard their work as part of an open, > cumulative and universal human project. Taxpayer dollars support a large > amount of academic research, so much so that both the United States and > European Union have open access requirements for publicly funded work -- > although they have not yet fully figured out how to fund that > requirement. Some Western academics have been boycotting publishers > viewed as profiting unreasonably from their role as middlemen between > academics and their own scholarship. > > What comes next? > > The U.S. and European open access mandates point to a future that looks > a lot like a legal Sci-Hub: cheap, open and all you can eat. And this > future appears to be getting closer. In mid-May, the largest Swedish > university library consortium dropped its contract with Elsevier, > objecting to the price of database access. Universities have taken > similar actions in Germany and France. In practice, libraries have more > leverage in these negotiations because of Sci-Hub, which offers > researchers a back channel to Elsevier-published articles. > > As with the music industry, it's possible that the publishers themselves > will provide these better services and thereby marginalize their pirate > competitors. As with music, publishers are learning that controlling the > platform can be more lucrative than owning the content -- a shift that > has underwritten a variety of publisher experiments with open or hybrid > access models. It's also possible that the combination of legal pressure > abroad and an increasingly repressive Russian state will break the > online and personal networks that sustain the Sci-Hub/LibGen ecosystem. > > In the meantime, the Russian shadow libraries will continue to support > the global research community, shift the balance of power between > libraries and publishers, and -- perhaps most important -- raise faculty > and students' expectations about what meaningful access to knowledge > entails, which publishers and universities will need to evolve to meet. > > They will, in short, keep the pressure on to find legal ways to expand > access for the tens of millions of new students and researchers entering > global higher education. > > > > > Joe Karaganis (@jjkaraganis) is vice president at the American Assembly, > a public policy institute at Columbia University, and editor of "Shadow > Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education" (MIT Press, > 2018), downloadable free. > > Balazs Bodo (@bodobalazs) is a senior research scientist at the > Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam. > > > ------------------------------ > > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > > End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 130, Issue 13 > ****************************************** > -- Stephen Antonoplis (818) 317-4105
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