Tim Gowers offers some background to the overwhelming case for open access publication. Sci-hub is an example of an almost inevitable reaction to the blatant profiteering by certain academic publishers. Let's remember that in the main, taxpayers across the world, through their governments, almost alone, pay for the very expensive business of carrying out university and institutional research and preparing manuscripts for publication.
And they pay for it multiple times over. They pay once for the researchers carrying out the work, and then they pay again for the reviewers, who provide their peer review services for free (i.e., not paid by the journal). Then, they pay for it a third time when universities (the government-funded ones, at least) have to pay exorbitant subscription fees to access the research.
And a fourth time on a per-article basis if you, as an individual, non-academic taxpayer, would like you read the very research your taxes have funded.
Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
And setting aside the principle for a second - how many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
I'm a non-academic taxpayer trying to read articles and don't have access through my employer or public library. I know other people in the same situation. Emailing the authors directly to request a copy is a known legitimate workaround, but in cases where I'm trying to read a paper on fungal propagation from 1971 (most recent example, from last week) the options are limited.
I would also imagine that if these things were more readily available people would be more likely to use them.
> Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
Before the existence of sci-hub, I spent several hundred taxpayer euros to download taxpayer-funded research from journals that my library was not subscribed to. I was not aware that asking the library for a single pdf cost about 30 or 40 EUR, until the librarian told me. Then I stopped because it was obviously ridiculous.
> how many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
A different question to ask. Why should taxpayers not have access to the articles which they funded for? It doesn't matter whether they read it or not. They pay, they have access.
> Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
I would be very interested to see statistics on this, because I suspect the answer is "almost nobody" - as I assume your question was meant to imply.
> ... [How] many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
Count me in this population, although to be honest it literally never occurred to me to check if the local public library had journal access.
> Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
For various business interests I have paid full price to read scientific studies quite a few times. And I felt foolish about it later once I learned about Sci-Hub. I'm sure there are many other entrepreneurs that could admit the same. Sci-hub is great and a very important service.
Peer review is the whole point of a journal and yet they do not get paid for their invaluable work. They should just form their own group so they can review academic works independently and publish online. There is no reason to have "journals" anymore.
It seems like open access doesn't really solve the problem of paying more than necessary though. Open access means that if a country funds a particular piece of research then they're funding that piece for the entire world. Why shouldn't the information be at least limited enough that the society ('societies' if it's a partnership) funding the research is the one to take the profits?
I think there’s some commingling in this argument. When an institution subscribed they are getting access to research done by _other_ institutions. Presumably they have their own records of their own research.
Some, but not all, universities do have institutional repositories for their own work. But they are at best inconsistently used. Some academics also (when allowed by the licensing agreement of the journal) put their own research on a personal/lab website. But again, this is inconsistent, and really relies on secondary solutions like Google Scholar to be usable (unless you already know exactly which paper you're looking for and navigate directly to the author's website).
The bottom line is that in most cases, academics rely on journals even for access to research from other folks in their own university. Things get passed around informally. And there are changing trends, such as preprint archives (like ArXiv), in some fields. But the majority of research is still paywalled.
Edit: To return to your point, yes, I was sort of discussing some Platonic ideal of "The Taxpayer". Obviously, if you live in the US, your taxes don't pay for research in Europe (only for universities' access to that research). And we could be talking about federal taxes for federal grants, but state taxes for state-run schools. But in general, the point is that the journals make exorbitant profits from labour paid with public funds.
Not really. Sure, you could go get the paper from the guy down the hall, but most universities don't have their own hub for publications that is accessible to their faculty.
Sci hub benefits from having journals enforce standards, have editors, reviewers, and a ton of value added that they didn't pay for. I like Sci Hub, but it didn't create a lot of the value it provides - it does that on the $ of a lot of other actors.
Even arxiv was getting flooded with crap and had to do some gatekeeping. Sci hub gets a huge benefit from the publishing industry at keeping out a flood of crap and pseudo science nonsense that floods most places that don't have such a process.
And I am aware of that most don't, having published enough papers, reviewed papers, and been asked by journals to review for them.
However, I never claimed reviewers were paid. I did state Sci Hub is getting benefits they didn't pay for, like keeping out crap, the value from being reviewed, uniform quality from known journals, etc.
If I, having published academic papers, and in many cases keeping my own copyrights as I always try to negotiate that (and a surprising amount of journals will let you if you ask), want scihub to not publish my work, funded by me, and published by journals I selected, will they remove it? No?
Then they are stealing the same as others. It's just their theft is popular since it lets people access stuff for free.
> I did state Sci Hub is getting benefits they didn't pay for, like keeping out crap, the value from being reviewed, uniform quality from known journals, etc.
A few journal pay editors and reviewers, but the vast majority do not, so Sci-Hub is paying the same as anyone else.
> will they remove it?
Last time I checked, Sci-Hub doesn't host, it proxies, so your license to the journal to distribute the paper is still what applies. The journal has standing, but you don't.
And the idea of uniform quality from known journals is laughable.
Who is going to review for sci hub? Reviewers review for the journal the decide to - and that's based on the quality of a journal. I will review for a good journal. I won't for a bad one.
Who would review for sci hub? I wouldn't, and I doubt many if any top researchers would either. Sci hub will accept the crappiest of stuff, so I (and pretty much anyone else doing solid reviews) would not bother.
>Sci-Hub doesn't host, it proxies
Did you check that or write it because you want to believe that?
Sci hub pulls a copy to sci hub using stolen credentials when you ask for a copy. For example, here [1] is one of my papers that sci hub has copied and serves from their site. (not sure how long they cache copies, but it's not hard to see using chrome and viewing requests to tell where files come from). The paper even has a front page and watermarks added in 2016 from where it was downloaded from. So no, sci-hub didn't just proxy to the journal.
How can you steal something that is basically free to copy (I mean the process of copying)? It is not even the same case as with songs and movies where the actual creator may arguibly lose “something”, but the author here doesn’t even get compensation from his/her work based on journal sells. The only thing scihub does is not give additional profit to journals, while greatly enhancing the life of many many people partly those that produce the actual value as well (even those who would otherwise have access because university vpns suck), and morally the latter is the good thing to do.
>he author here doesn’t even get compensation from his/her work based on journal sells
Did you make that up or actually google to see if any journals pay? Because some do.
I get royalties on stuff I've personally written. Some of it is in technical books, and I've not checked, but I bet sci-hub even copies such stuff.
So care again to claim sci hub is not affecting any authors?
Finally, if an author wants his/her papers spread, it's easy to do. If an author only want their work in a certain journal, then the author can do that. Sci hub removes any author wish from the equation without author permission.
For example, there is no way for me to remove papers I wrote that sci hub has copied onto their servers (see above for an example link).
> Then they are stealing the same as others. It's just their theft is popular since it lets people access stuff for free.
As has already been pointed out in this thread, the work has been bought and paid for by taxpayers. Your work is based upon the work of others, isn't it? I'm sure your work is filled with citations of other works that were taxpayer funded.
Sure, there is the odd case like yours where you funded your own work. But to argue that the world should be denied access to all scientific knowledge because a tiny, minuscule portion of it was privately funded is pretty lame.
>Your work is based upon the work of others, isn't it? I'm sure your work is filled with citations of other works that were taxpayer funded.
Are you claiming one cannot get paid for their work if it build on the works of anything taxpayer funded?
Are you claiming anything taxpayer funded must be open access to all?
Both of these seem too shortsighted to be reasonable, in which case there is some middle ground. Sci hub taking things because it's popular is not going to be a good model for pretty much any future.
> Are you claiming one cannot get paid for their work if it build on the works of anything taxpayer funded?
No.
> Are you claiming anything taxpayer funded must be open access to all?
Absolutely.
> Sci hub taking things because it's popular is not going to be a good model for pretty much any future.
Why they're taking things is irrelevant. The fact is that them doing so is a net positive for humanity. There are billions (BILLIONS) of people who can now access knowledge that's been locked away. That's a net positive.
There's only a tiny fraction of that that is self-funded, and those folk can just stop publishing, or find another business model.
>> Are you claiming one cannot get paid for their work if it build on the works of anything taxpayer funded?
>No.
>> Are you claiming anything taxpayer funded must be open access to all?
> Absolutely.
Ok, then good. In many, if not most, fields, the vast majority of academic papers are not completely taxpayer funded, and in many cases they are privately funded. For example, in CS, big company R&D researchers did the work. In medicine, a significant amount of papers are from Pharma companies, and a lot of academic work is partially funded by companies. The same is in every field. Sample a top CS journal and you'll see how much of it is not from taxpayer funding - MS, Google, FB, etc., researchers likely constitute the majority of top CS publications for some time now.
So, given that it's now clear that a significant amount of the papers sci hub copies were not taxpayer funded, and probably the majority are not totally taxpayer funded, care to drop the claim it's ok for sci hub to copy these because you thought they were paid for by taxpayers?
Because it, like make things people claim here with no understanding of the complexity or bothering to even look, is wrong.
I think the fundamental problem is that academics historically gave away their copyright [1]:
> Traditionally, the author of an article was required to transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers claimed this was necessary in order to protect author's rights, and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish instead.
I'd love to learn more about how this system evolved.
Because those academics were (and are) a bunch of egotistical, money-grubbing fools who would rather sell up their scientific integrity in exchange for some imaginary 'reputation' points.
Science is science, it shouldn't matter where it's published.
Science is not science. There is a lot of garbage being produced, you need a way to sort through it. Hierarchies of journals or conferences will naturally emerge regardless of the payment model. Just check the field of machine learning where most papers are open access and yet prestige depends on where it's published. This is orthogonal to the matter at hand.
Being published by prestigious journals isn't just about ego, it's about future career opportunities, getting grants, getting to work on things you want to work on possibly with some of the most brilliant people in your field.
I think people at the top could make things change with a massive concerted effort, and I think things will change naturally as younger people who've had a taste of open acess get access to top positions but it's too reductive to put things down to researchers' greed and ego.
Nobody benefits from this system except publishers.
Academics hate it, but publications is the way they are measured by public institutions for, e.g., grants, or when being hired. There's no symbiosis, it has evolved in this way mostly because of decisions taken by non-academics (ministries, governments, administrative staff etc.) and nobody knows how to get out of it.
But it does, there's a limited amount of hours in the day and an infinite amount of papers. You need someone to pre-screen the torrent of crap that has an occasional jewel floating in it, and traditionally journal editors have served that role.
How many Open Source projects are managed by an individual, or a small dedicated group? If they can do it - by self organising! - it's baffling that some of the 'smartest' minds in the world are unable to comprehend what's going on in their field on a meta-level.
Peer review is supposed to filter out the crassest nonsense (it usually does). What a journal does is grading. When you are reading stuff where you don't know the relevant names personally a good heuristic is the journal. You don't bother with Hindawi and MDPI and just read stuff from the better-known publishers.
We are all very aware of it, but it's not easy to get out of it if the people that pay you measure you based on those metrics.
Open access is partially solving the problem though and imposing open access to all publicly funded research seems to me a good compromise.
In my former life as a research engineer I learned to avoid no-name publishers, institutions, and conference proceedings because they are filled with lies. Not poor caliber material - outright fabrications.
That's not to say prestigious journals are immune from bad science, just that the consequences for fraud are a bit worse and bar to clear for publishing it much higher.
The vast majority of academics are underpaid workers in precarious jobs who need those publications because securing one of the few stable positions is explicitly tied to having enough imaginary points.
Patents and copyrights in many cases have become a tumor, destroying their original purposes to enable rent seeking from disgusting and harmful organizations.
Yes, it's disgusting. Intellectual property in general makes little sense but copyright in particular is just so bad. It's gotten to the point copyright infringement is civil disobedience. People should just do it, consequences be damned, until governments get rid of these outdated laws.
Every time I tried to find reasons for their continued existence strong enough to outweigh obvious downsides, I was met with utter failure.
Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties.
Patron and Kickstarter have shown that we are very much capable of funding artists remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the latter.
As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined); as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they administer).
I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and tanking the higher bandwidth costs).
Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose.
As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum, financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if it ever happens to get sold.
It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction, where the study administrators calculate the required budget, and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't happen.
I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system.
In the movie industry, people would put their money where their mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall get a first season.
There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an example.
> It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties.
I would expect the exact opposite. Do you have any data? I’d expect the primary money maker for artists is people buying their products or getting those products from the channels the artist chooses. E.g buying a dvd or watching my show on Netflix or watching my video on my YouTube channel or buying a print of my drawing.
Patreon processes payments of less than a billion dollars per year, so artists’ money seems to be, by far, made via copyright protection.
There’s a question about what fraction of artists make a living, and I expect the majority don’t make a living from it. Most artists probably don’t do it for the money. Most probably just have it as a hobby. That said I’m glad some artists can make a living at it.
I have yet to see any evidence that switching to a copyright free world would help anyone but the hobbyists and big companies who can afford to exploit the fruits of the hobbyists labors (I imagine some kind of YouTube like company going around taking everyone’s content and putting it in a central place and making bank off ads).
You seem to be getting at this with your mention about the need for “anti-tivoization” regulation. When you flesh that out, trying to regulate away the worst exploitative practices and enabling a professional class of artists, you’d end up with something that looks a lot like copyright law.
Yes, I expect that to be the currently primary income pathway for artists, but I share your expectation about the majority not being able to live from it.
The primary issue with copyright aren't the royalties, it's the bookkeeping (and, to a lesser extend, things like translations being at the mercy of the copyright owner).
I gave Patreon as something that showed that we appear to be cable of funding art without relying on copyright.
I doubt the part about the big corp succeeding by fleecing everyone with ads. Have you seen the UX of e.g. popcorntime? If not, I suggest to read up on just how low friction these things already are, and that's with the typical use being illegal.
And no, the anti-tivoization part is about preventing corporations from using DRM and/or hardware-locking to stop users from modifying the software running on their devices. I'd want exceptions for systems that are fully restricted from any kind of software/firmware update, like e.g. Yubikeys. But if systems support software updates, the user must not be prevented from running their own code on hardware they own, though of course a way to lock systems permanently down is reasonable and likely needed for cases where the owner can't ensure physical security.
I agree with everything you said here pretty much. The way I would address the problem is to perhaps outright get rid of patents, limit copyright to 5 years, eliminate any ability to copyright software, and allow for trademarks as that is just the identifier for a specific brand.
Yes, patents stopped fulfilling their societal contract decades ago. I do no think anything critical necessarily relies on them being a thing.
As for copyright, though.... a large part of the downsides lie with having to do bookkeeping and such. I'd argue for a total elimination of copyright, only keeping some very basic anti-plagiarism clauses (don't copy and then claim it was you who did it). They have to rely on intent, however. Accidentally reciting a joke and thinking you came up with it has to be very far from the grey zone.
Trademarks are a vehicle for reputation and trust in a market, see e.g. how you can't buy poor quality tools branded "Knipex", or how Samsung is know to not employ overly deceptive branding/advertising for their portable flash media, along with being known for at least decent reliability.
The argument a layman would make in favour of this is:
"if people know they could rent seek with their intellectual property and potentially make millions of dollars charging people for licenses / gatekeeping their work, well that's going to motivate them to create really good work! Without this motivation, no one would create good work"
And it's like, ignoring all the well-established counter-arguments to this, it kind of seems to justify its own existence through contradiction. It says, in essence, "We have to coerce people into making really good work by not giving them the building blocks that they could use to make really good work"
What building blocks? Creative work is original. You can build on previous ideas - or not, it's up to you - but it's nothing at all like gluing together a bunch of frameworks that someone else created and patting yourself on the head for being a true original.
I'll accept that copyright is bad when developers who hate copyright give all of their work away for free - code, consultancy, equity, all of it.
Until then people earning six figures a year telling artists they should work for nothing - or perhaps some begging on Patreon which might cover the rent (but probably won't) - is insultingly naive and unattractively entitled.
This has nothing to do with academic journals, which are a very special and obnoxious example of rent-seeking and which absolutely should be replaced by open access - not least because the work has already been paid for by the public.
But that shouldn't be confused with the creative arts, where new work isn't funded by the public. In fact it isn't usually funded by anyone at all, except the artist.
If you want creators to work for free, you'll get what you pay for - which will be somewhere in the uncanny valley between nothing at all, and disposable filler of no real interest.
Are you saying e.g. a Rock cover of a classic piece isn't original work? Because last I checked, the composer can demand royalties (if it's not so old that it expired).
Of course you can sell physical things. You can even sell digital things, but transformative works are a way of creative expression. Or, say, a live streamer on Twitch doing an IRL (using a mobile uplink while out and about) getting their content (people seem to like it, so it appears to have some value) deleted/banned because a car with an open window waiting at the stoplight had the radio on.
And I don't know where you got that I'm making six figures. I'm just not aware of individual artists making a living by selling digital copies of their work. I'm not saying they should put a free-download button there, but having to keep track of who made which parts when (copyright and expiry) is a gigantic pain, especially for small artists who do transformative work.
I'm primarily attacking the rent-seeking model of software houses and (at least most of) the MPAA & RIAA.
I want to encourage work-for-hire (potentially payed by a collective) and Patreon-like models over rent-seeking business "propositions". The benefit is that all the censorship for reasons other than legality and bookkeeping for royalties would be gone. It would enable far better privacy, too.
The idea that the alternative to copyright means artists working for free is an ideological conflation not even the wealthiest, most cynical person on earth could have dreamt up.
Well, see the AV1 codec? They made it because they were sick of patents and license costs for H.265, preferring to fund the development of a completely new one, primarily to avoid the fees.
Or see RedHat and their Linux development/support. They don't rent-seek via copyright. And no proprietary programming language has a large user base. The closest is probably Microsoft Excel, I'd guess.
I cannot tell you how hilarious it is to me that the by-far-easiest part of research - the incredibly trivial act of posting a paper on a website - is the only part that is privatized and immensely profitable
I would be more supportive of their cause if Libgen was limited to academic books, but I've found nearly every fiction/nonfiction book I've wanted to on there; it was just a standard book piracy website to me.
The case for textbooks is much weaker than papers as, although it's basically implied that most won't make any money, it's an almost herculean task to write a good textbook (of 1k pages let's say).
I steal all my papers (I am a member of the tyre society - ladies queue up please... - because it's so obscure I can't find them on Sci-Hub) but I don't mind paying for textbooks on principle.
The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new edition every other year, with slightly different pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price.
In the past, prices were more reasonable, and you'd buy standard texts to build a personal library because you'd enter the profession; nowadays it's all about fleecing students, who need a college degree to enter the workforce. The social contract around textbooks has broken down as much as it has around journals.
> The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new edition every other year, with slightly different pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price.
This is what really gets me. I don't necessarily mind charging $150 new for a big textbook, especially given the likelihood of it being shoveled back into the used market, but when the used textbook market is also killed off via gimmicks like new editions that do little more than shuffle exercises or one-time-use online codes, the justification for that high initial price tag is lost.
And I say this as somebody who also curated a personal library of textbooks that I do refer to in my day-to-day work!
It's an incredibly toxic cycle. The book is expensive because it is required for completion of an already expensive task (a class). Teachers and departments require the latest evergreen textbook because of incentives from the publishers paid for with the profits of the sales of said evergreen books.
How does education get off of the treadmill? Students can't reasonable refuse to buy the new textbook. They could organize and demand that professors stop, but in some fields the subject matter does change relatively frequently e.g. advanced medical courses. So the opposition would point to those and ask the rhetorical question "Don't you want your education to be current?. It is unlikely that professors at scale will act unilaterally because they are at best neutral in this situation.
It could be solved, perhaps, with legislation, although it seems that such things are fairly universal across countries (although I am somewhat ignorant of how it works in Europe) and if the Europeans haven't tried to regulate it yet, it is incredibly unlikely that the Americans would try.
Book piracy is the logical result of this cycle. If book prices were reduced either through reduced evergreening causing the used market to exist again or by some other means then piracy would reduce as well.
The answer may be surprising: pay teaching faculty better and give them proper job security. Students see only the textbook, but there's the other half, the slides that come with the textbook that contingent faculty will use for their lectures. If teaching faculty were to stay in any one place for more than three years they would prepare their own lecture materials instead on relying on the readymade pap.
Students would have to push for proper teaching. Unfortunately, in these times of elite overproduction they are more interested in their GPA to get into medical school.
Among the strongest counterarguments to the textbooks case is the law article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright", written by an academic and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1970. The author argued three principle points:
- That the only defensible justification of copyright is a consequentialist economic balance between maximizing the distribution of works and encouraging their production.
- That there is significant historical, logical, and anecdotal evidence which shows that exclusive rights will provide only limited increases in the volume of literary production, particularly within certain sections of the book market.
- That there was limited justification for contemporary expansions in the scope and duration of copyright.
A substantial portion of the analysis is directed to the textbook market.
Copyright at the time of publication required registration, and was for a term of 28 years, renewable for an additional term, so or 54 years, lapsing four years from now in 2024. Subsequent copyright revisions have extended by 41 years, to a total duration of 95 years, expiring in 2065. Best I can tell, copyright is held by the Harvard Law Review Association, rather than the author, presently Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer.
Though the article is available via LibGen (or Sci-Hub).
Well authors also want to make money, so we have to choose between having high quality writing that people get paid for or free low quality writing that people don't get paid for.
People with something to say will write regardless of whether they get paid. People wrote books before copyright and will continue to write books no matter what happens. The internet itself proves this. I have no doubt they'll find other ways to make money through writing. Maybe authors will be able to set up a patreon or something.
An artificial 100+ year monopoly on the data they create is nothing but rent seeking. It's also unenforceable in the 21st century.
A lot of people arguing about scientists should just publish to their “group” journal for free.
You all are missing a key piece though, these scientists are trained / conditioned to believe that getting “published in a top paid journal” is prestigious so they jump at the chance to do it.
We simultaneously need a campaign to make publishing in these paid journals unsexy _and_ have it be freely published.
Just my own 2c, part of what makes this whole thing so frustrating & confounding is that it's hard to tell how valuable a paper is going to be to you until you've read it. Reading abstracts gives some idea, but there's plenty of papers that end up being not that interesting. Given the extreme price these journals charge for individual access, the it becomes extremely hard to survey & locate & subsequently purchase relevant research.
90% of papers I read turn out useless. I have a hard time finding good review articles among all that watered-down garbage. If I had to pay to view each one or even subscribe...I wouldn’t get too far.
it is for this reason that I am biased to papers from the 90s and earlier (for certain fields). when there are less papers churned out of desperation to fulfill university degree requirements or yet another use case report of a third party's framework/library.
While I am fairly sympathetic to the cause in the abstract, as someone who had to clean up after various incursions from the folks doing the mass downloading, the methods ... let's just say that they have externalities that I and many others end up having to deal with.
You'd say that Scihub has crossed the line from civil disobedience into outright insurrection.
That said, librarians were trying to work within the system, including raising public consciousness, unsubscribing whole journal packages that included high-profile journals, and nothing happened until Scihub came along. It's the best argument against Kriton that I've seen.
One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”
Why not? We're supposed to just accept this? The US imposes these laws on the entire world via trade agreements and the world is supposed to simply go along with it?
Tim Gowers offers some background to the overwhelming case for open access publication. Sci-hub is an example of an almost inevitable reaction to the blatant profiteering by certain academic publishers. Let's remember that in the main, taxpayers across the world, through their governments, almost alone, pay for the very expensive business of carrying out university and institutional research and preparing manuscripts for publication.