I’m ok with library Sci-Hub, but less so with Library Genesis. Pirating books reduces the incentives for authors to write more books. Pirating academic articles won’t reduce academics’ incentives to write papers.
The libraries where I live are seriously a joke anyway, and even if they were not, I doubt they could compete with a website where you can find monographs addressed to like 100 people, in seconds, in your pyjamas.
That's honestly quite tragic as we don't evolve anywhere fast enough to not be hit by global depression as the digital solitude clashes with the innate human needs of real socialization.
I am not kidding at all. We have that government library app sort of thing. It makes you wait for a digital copy. Like there's a line of people before you, just like in an old school library.
Not all of us are able to, or want to, use ebooks. Especially textbooks where one may be going back and forth through chapters fairly frequently. Simply saying "muh Libgen" ignores how most people , especially teenagers, study. For teenagers, any smart device will lead to distraction if connected online. They usually choose Insta over the PDF reader in their distraction.
Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. Perhaps it's the quality of my writing but my personal experience is that even being way more concise, most people wouldn't care.
I bet the editors read it not once, but several times. And I bet it was even noticed years later and posted on websites where many others read it, were impressed, and commented on it. Don Knuth’s letters are special.
It's not a real letter. It's an (implicit?) open letter that is just a self published article, with the hidden threat that everyone will see it [1] so if they don't agree they will look bad.
[1] And nobody will read it, and everybody agree even the publisher. The publisher want to increase the price anyway, and everyone else want a cheaper journal.
Because people keep throwing huge amounts of money and content to Elsevier while asking them to stop making money.
This isn't a defense of Elsevier by the way. The scholarly system is abysmal for publications and it's seemingly incapable of any meaningful change over non-geological timeframes.
But if you keep paying people to do something then they're going to keep doing it. If they stop, someone else will appear if that's the kind of thing you're funding.
What's insane to me is the biggest complaints come from three main groups - scientists, libraries/the universities that fund them, and funders. The content producers keep giving Elsevier content, the libraries keep buying it and the funders keep paying the content producers to give their content to Elsevier. Universities keep demanding academics give their content and their time for free to these journals else they don't get the progression they want.
Elsevier is a nasty symptom but a symptom non-the-less of this dysfunction. Those groups can absolutely change how things are done but the field moves glacially.
For Elsevier, Knuth was just an editor of a Journal at peak. He is not a legend for them just one of hundreds and thousands of legends they manage.
Like a (legendary) middle manager which is in the company since the start and built it up but does not agree with the current business goals of the company. We know what happens with these managers.
They don't talk to anyone unless many libraries stop paying [0]. I wonder however if those open access deals will mean the death blow to printed copies and classical libraries.
I love the veiled threat in Page 4 about Journal of Logic Programming all editors abandoning Elsevier and starting a new journal (Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)), noting the TPLP thrived after this and Elsevier's own restart having gone off the map. Especially with the balancing note at the end saying the cost per page of this new journal wasn't much cheaper.
The story goes that one of Niels Bohr's friends visited him and found him deeply engrossed in writing an application to a fund. Surprised, the friend asked why it took so long for such a prominent scientist as Bohr to write a simple application. Bohr replied, "I'm trying to make it short, but I haven't had time yet."
> In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.
It's interesting to note that in the context of this letter about the Journal of Algorithms, that there is now an open-access journal called "Algorithms" which looks like it launched five years after this letter:
With a different set of problems imo. MDPI is a for-profit publisher with a "pay-to-publish" model, charging authors $1800 per accepted paper. And also a mixed reputation on quality, verging on a "paper mill" where they accept anything just to maximize their publication fees. Not a great model imo. There are non-profit Platinum OA journals that don't charge publication fees, like JMLR (https://www.jmlr.org/), which is the only kind of OA I consider interesting.
No, the price of ebooks is insane and getting worse. Libraries are somewhat of a captive market for publishers and they set insane costs & limit the number of times an ebook can be checked out before the library has to buy it again. IMO the cost of electronic materials to libraries is one of the biggest issues in our society that no one talks or knows about.
It's hard to compare as the business model has changed, I believe that nowadays it's basically impossible for a library to get an individual subscription to a individual journal: subscriptions are bundled and (online) subscriptions are sold institution wide with contracts running in the millions. That's very different from what Kunth is describing, where individual libraries choosing what subscriptions they need (eg we need the JoA in our (physical) collection so we buy a subscription to that).
Aaron Swartz articulated the problems with gatekeeping of knowledge.
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
> P. S. Im sending copies of this letter to several friends who are interested in journal publishing but are not members of our board. But this is not an "open letter"; I would prefer not to have my remarks circulated widely. I'm emphatically not a revolutionary. I just want our journal to do the right thing.
:/
EDIT: as others have pointed out the letter is now hosted publicly by Knuth himself.
Besides arxiv which is free, the last time I looked at papers properly was when I was a graduate student.
so, of course I had free access to virtually everything.
It’s not really cost effective to subscribe to an individual journal and the topics across an entire journal are not as focused as you might think.
there’s a lot of irrelevant stuff published compared to your specific research (the purpose of these papers is to publish very specific articles and you read them to help you with your own very specific research.)
Alls to say it’s an odd question because an individual wouldn’t really subscribe to a specific journal, like you would with a magazine or periodical.
Well, there's _TUGboat_, the journal of the TeX User's Group --- free with a membership (or membership is free w/ a subscription), but it's rather specialized, and a non-profit thing.
There is a common irony of authors selling overpriced books complaining about things being too expensive. And I wish it applied to Knuth.
Unfortunately, Knuth books are not the most expensive, by far. Sure, TAOCP is about $300, which is expensive, but it is not a single book, and it totals to about 3000 pages, which is 10 cents per page. It is actually below average for textbooks.
In his letter, he complains about articles selling at 50 cents per page, so 5 times more than his "most expensive" books. So for me, it is true that Knuth is "part of the system", and also that buying TAOCP is probably a waste of your money (because there is >90% chance you will never read it...), but here, he has a point. So much that today, many don't even bother paying for articles at all, if it is not open access and it is not on sci-hub, it gets ignored.
American Chemical Society is the one of the main publishers in molecular sciences. Researchers at Finnish universities haven't been able to access articles published after 2023 after failed negotiations [0], greatly hindering one's - and collectively the nation's - ability to progress in these fields. It's quite frustrating, shocking, and eye-opening to have this rug pulled beneath you.
Finland is not a poor country, and the situation is surely worse elsewhere. Nonetheless, our economy and the academic funding situation is quite crappy and getting crappier. In 2022, Finnish university library consortium spent ~25M€ for subscriptions [3]. Last year, the negotiated sum for seven main publishers was ~16M€, inc the failed ACS deal. One can easily imagine better ways to use the dozens of millions.
Science is expensive and inequalities between countries/uni's/wherever are a n unfortunate fact of the world. Not every player can pay millions to get the 10M€ Cryo-EM machine, and thus can't compete in advancing knowledge frontier in this.
To some extent, constraints cultivate creativity. One can still participate through collaboration, theoretical and computational work, creative crafting of experiments with already existing equipment (& with fascinating DIY low-cost open-science hardwarex stuff!)
However, one must know the giants on whose shoulders one stands on, and the game played by the behemoth publishers attacks this fundament. The consequence - inequality in accessing knowledge is deeply disgusting in its artificiality.
Meanwhile, people at eg. MIT are able to get the whole ACS corpus in sweet delicious machine readable XML [3]. In the same time it takes for the "poor" researcher to get one email requested watermarked pdf with detached figures that they excitedly share to their group, a Boston grad student can curl terabytes and science-of-science/NLP/RAG the shit out of it.
Gap exists and grows with the arbitrarily increasing costs. Something needs to change, but for now, I'm cynical. Strong will get stronger and so on.
Thank god for open science movement living on github and *rxivs, and for the risky work taken on by shadow librarians.
[+] [-] sam_lowry_|2 years ago|reply
And I am only half-kidding.
[+] [-] Kratacoa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1980phipsi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d_tr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freefaler|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] queuebert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juls333|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yard2010|2 years ago|reply
Why? Just use Genesis
[+] [-] OneDonOne|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vasco|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azangru|2 years ago|reply
His addressees were members of the editorial board. Surely the editorial board should be accustomed to reading lengthy prose?
Now, writing a 14-page letter, of a quality that matches published articles, is what's wild to me.
[+] [-] nirse|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justin66|2 years ago|reply
You really cannot understand why Donald Knuth would expect the editorial board of The Journal of Algorithms to read his letter?
[+] [-] kaiwen1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|2 years ago|reply
[1] And nobody will read it, and everybody agree even the publisher. The publisher want to increase the price anyway, and everyone else want a cheaper journal.
[+] [-] jf|2 years ago|reply
Given the topic and my love for Knuth, I went into this paper ready to agree with him. But Knuth does a great job at stating his case.
This sentence caught my eye: "Elsevier, however, ignored my letter and did not reply" - who in their right mind would ignore a letter from Knuth?!
[+] [-] IanCal|2 years ago|reply
This isn't a defense of Elsevier by the way. The scholarly system is abysmal for publications and it's seemingly incapable of any meaningful change over non-geological timeframes.
But if you keep paying people to do something then they're going to keep doing it. If they stop, someone else will appear if that's the kind of thing you're funding.
What's insane to me is the biggest complaints come from three main groups - scientists, libraries/the universities that fund them, and funders. The content producers keep giving Elsevier content, the libraries keep buying it and the funders keep paying the content producers to give their content to Elsevier. Universities keep demanding academics give their content and their time for free to these journals else they don't get the progression they want.
Elsevier is a nasty symptom but a symptom non-the-less of this dysfunction. Those groups can absolutely change how things are done but the field moves glacially.
[+] [-] oaiey|2 years ago|reply
Like a (legendary) middle manager which is in the company since the start and built it up but does not agree with the current business goals of the company. We know what happens with these managers.
[+] [-] riedel|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier
[+] [-] gorkempacaci|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soegaard|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwilk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinclayton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svat|2 years ago|reply
> In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
[+] [-] b800h|2 years ago|reply
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms
[+] [-] tokai|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers...
[+] [-] _delirium|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devsda|2 years ago|reply
How much does the existence of open access journals affect the affordability overall ?
[+] [-] RheingoldRiver|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nirse|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oli5679|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TOMDM|2 years ago|reply
:/
EDIT: as others have pointed out the letter is now hosted publicly by Knuth himself.
[+] [-] nextaccountic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TylerE|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kensai|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vargr616|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrinkWater|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p0w3n3d|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prirun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amerine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingkongjaffa|2 years ago|reply
so, of course I had free access to virtually everything.
It’s not really cost effective to subscribe to an individual journal and the topics across an entire journal are not as focused as you might think.
there’s a lot of irrelevant stuff published compared to your specific research (the purpose of these papers is to publish very specific articles and you read them to help you with your own very specific research.)
Alls to say it’s an odd question because an individual wouldn’t really subscribe to a specific journal, like you would with a magazine or periodical.
[+] [-] WillAdams|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1oooqooq|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, Knuth books are not the most expensive, by far. Sure, TAOCP is about $300, which is expensive, but it is not a single book, and it totals to about 3000 pages, which is 10 cents per page. It is actually below average for textbooks.
In his letter, he complains about articles selling at 50 cents per page, so 5 times more than his "most expensive" books. So for me, it is true that Knuth is "part of the system", and also that buying TAOCP is probably a waste of your money (because there is >90% chance you will never read it...), but here, he has a point. So much that today, many don't even bother paying for articles at all, if it is not open access and it is not on sci-hub, it gets ignored.
[+] [-] rauhallinen|2 years ago|reply
American Chemical Society is the one of the main publishers in molecular sciences. Researchers at Finnish universities haven't been able to access articles published after 2023 after failed negotiations [0], greatly hindering one's - and collectively the nation's - ability to progress in these fields. It's quite frustrating, shocking, and eye-opening to have this rug pulled beneath you.
Finland is not a poor country, and the situation is surely worse elsewhere. Nonetheless, our economy and the academic funding situation is quite crappy and getting crappier. In 2022, Finnish university library consortium spent ~25M€ for subscriptions [3]. Last year, the negotiated sum for seven main publishers was ~16M€, inc the failed ACS deal. One can easily imagine better ways to use the dozens of millions.
Science is expensive and inequalities between countries/uni's/wherever are a n unfortunate fact of the world. Not every player can pay millions to get the 10M€ Cryo-EM machine, and thus can't compete in advancing knowledge frontier in this.
To some extent, constraints cultivate creativity. One can still participate through collaboration, theoretical and computational work, creative crafting of experiments with already existing equipment (& with fascinating DIY low-cost open-science hardwarex stuff!)
However, one must know the giants on whose shoulders one stands on, and the game played by the behemoth publishers attacks this fundament. The consequence - inequality in accessing knowledge is deeply disgusting in its artificiality.
Meanwhile, people at eg. MIT are able to get the whole ACS corpus in sweet delicious machine readable XML [3]. In the same time it takes for the "poor" researcher to get one email requested watermarked pdf with detached figures that they excitedly share to their group, a Boston grad student can curl terabytes and science-of-science/NLP/RAG the shit out of it.
Gap exists and grows with the arbitrarily increasing costs. Something needs to change, but for now, I'm cynical. Strong will get stronger and so on.
Thank god for open science movement living on github and *rxivs, and for the risky work taken on by shadow librarians.
[0] https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/
[1] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset
[2] https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-...
[3] https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data...
[+] [-] javierbg95|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kbradero|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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