Infosocialism vs JSTOR

[tantric]

background: the term 'infosocialism' comes from an RPG called Transhuman Space

This was a political philosophy developed (under the name "information socialism") by the Australian academic Kyle Porters in 2034. Originally from the left-anarchist tradition, Porters felt that the vision of a pure anarchosocialist society was unrealistic. Nevertheless, he observed that although modern civilization was utterly dependent on information technologies, the central notion of "intellectual property" often gave rise to significant injustice. He believed that only the state could properly reward innovation, while still distributing the benefits of such innovations fairly to all. Infosocialism thus began with the premise that "information needs to be free", but redefined freedom as the nationalization of intellectual property and its free distribution by the state. Thus the government does not allow patents, but subsidizes research and creative endeavor. This is less absurd when one imagines a "university" rather than "corporate" model of research and development.

Where this comes into play at the moment is in the field of academic publishing. Few people outside of grad school have any idea how such works. Consider this gem:

The objective efficacy of prayer: A double-blind clinical trial

looks like it might be interesting? If you have $39.95, you can read it. Or if you're a student at a first world university. These databases of peer reviewed articles are the corpus of scientific knowledge. You CANNOT do science without them, nor even basic research.This is how you separate facts from woo. Most of this research was funded with tax dollars, of course.

Now, to get radical

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for
themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries
in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of
private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the
sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?
Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to
children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they
make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal —
there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's
already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been
given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world
is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for
yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords
with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.



Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been
sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by
the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or
piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a
ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only
those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate
require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they
have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who
can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the
grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need
to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open
Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

That was then - the guy who wrote that, Aaron Swartz, is dead now. He also cofounded reddit, btw. He set up a computer to automatically download articles from a company called JSTOR and the feds decided to 'make an example out of him'. Even when JSTOR declined to prosecute, the feds utterly destroyed his life and hounded him until he hanged himself. There's a documentary about it - 'The Internet's Own Boy'.

The wealth of scientific knowledge belongs to the human race as a whole and I'M FUCKING TIRED OF BEING CALLED A PIRATE.

thoughts?

 

[Deepak]

The stranglehold is being eroded as open-access becomes more prominent. https://doaj.org/

I've no problem with companies making money if they're providing some service of value - i.e. contextual searches and indexing, hosting and bandwidth, or even for closed peer-review of papers.

What I would like to see change is the availability of these papers for open review as well, and for any papers that pass open review to be made available for hosting at third parties. What happens right now is JSTOR and ElSevier and their ilk using their positions in a rent-seeking manner when we all know that information really wants to be free.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

JSTOR is available for free at many libraries. For example, in Houston, with a library card, I can access JSTOR for free from my own computer at home. However, JSTOR does not have access to all journals.

I do support the concept that research supported by tax dollars in whole or part should be free for access by all.

Other services similar to JSTOR exist. OpenAthena is supported at many Universities. EBSCO available at my library has limited access to some journals.

It is ridiculous to be charging $20 for some 5 page journal article.

 

[tantric]

JSTOR is available for free at many libraries. For example, in Houston, with a library card, I can access JSTOR for free from my own computer at home. However, JSTOR does not have access to all journals.

I do support the concept that research supported by tax dollars in whole or part should be free for access by all.

Other services similar to JSTOR exist. OpenAthena is supported at many Universities. EBSCO available at my library has limited access to some journals.

It is ridiculous to be charging $20 for some 5 page journal article.

You are correct and my bad. After the bit with Swartz, JSTOR made it so you can 'borrow' three articles at a time for free - which is actually very nice. I just used them because the name carries so much weight. In truth, they are the only company I know of to do anything like this. And yes, you can drive to the university library and have access, even copy them to your jump drive, with nothing but a drivers' license....but you can't do it from a high school.

- - - Updated - - -

JSTOR is available for free at many libraries. For example, in Houston, with a library card, I can access JSTOR for free from my own computer at home. However, JSTOR does not have access to all journals.

I do support the concept that research supported by tax dollars in whole or part should be free for access by all.

Other services similar to JSTOR exist. OpenAthena is supported at many Universities. EBSCO available at my library has limited access to some journals.

It is ridiculous to be charging $20 for some 5 page journal article.

You are correct and my bad. After the bit with Swartz, JSTOR made it so you can 'borrow' three articles at a time for free - which is actually very nice. I just used them because the name carries so much weight. In truth, they are the only company I know of to do anything like this. And yes, you can drive to the university library and have access, even copy them to your jump drive, with nothing but a drivers' license....but you can't do it from a high school.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

- - - Updated - - -

JSTOR is available for free at many libraries. For example, in Houston, with a library card, I can access JSTOR for free from my own computer at home. However, JSTOR does not have access to all journals.

I do support the concept that research supported by tax dollars in whole or part should be free for access by all.

Other services similar to JSTOR exist. OpenAthena is supported at many Universities. EBSCO available at my library has limited access to some journals.

It is ridiculous to be charging $20 for some 5 page journal article.

You are correct and my bad. After the bit with Swartz, JSTOR made it so you can 'borrow' three articles at a time for free - which is actually very nice. I just used them because the name carries so much weight. In truth, they are the only company I know of to do anything like this. And yes, you can drive to the university library and have access, even copy them to your jump drive, with nothing but a drivers' license....but you can't do it from a high school.

Again, I can access JSTOR from home or anywhere I have access to a computer. So any high school student here can do the same. And I have been in the main librarry when new classes of new high school students were herded through the library to get library cards. The big problem with the library here is almost no scientific journals are carried. I have no idea how many other cities have access to JSTOR like this.

I do remember that about 4 years ago, a new site was set up to distribute, freely, scientific information about evolution to help counter creationism, so I suspect there are a number of specialized sites dedicated to disseminating good information to the general public.

It would be nice to have a list of such, graded on relevance.

Google search shows a fair amount of stuff.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/

Alexandra Elbakyan is my hero

Here’s another way I’m privileged: I have free access to the University of Minnesota library system, with all of its journal subscriptions, so I rarely have to worry about finding something published in the major journals, with a few annoying exceptions. It’s only now, then, that I’ve learned about Sci-Hub, but I’ll be using it more, especially to deal with those exceptions
....
For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court – a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub,
And...
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_journal_publishing_reform
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