You are confusing two things here: 1) the problems that for-profit journals bring, and 2) the supposed problems that all academic journals have, regardless of whether they are published by a for-profit or a non-profit publisher.
In certain fields, journals continue to be published by non-profit learned societies that now, in the digital era, make their articles freely available to all. And they certainly do verify what they publish inasmuch as the peer review process is rigorous and challenging, and even the most esteemed authors end up having to make major corrections to the paper to pass that review.
If you think journals as a vetted, reputable venue for scientific debate no longer have a place, just go look at Academia.edu today where anyone can sign up and participate in discussion sessions. The result: crackpots, cranks, and wacko alt-history or racist/nationalist extremists take over those discussion sessions, drowning out the actual scholars. Thank goodness for journals.
"This is not the same as Napster" - It's the same thing. Knowledge, when left to it's own nature, wants to be free and spread. The digital music revolution is just another aspect of this same concept, I never ever paid for any string of bits in my life, and never will. As an app developer, I implement all the tricks I know to stop people from pirating my work, but if they KNOW how to do it, and ARE WILLING to do it, good for them.
> The digital music revolution is just another aspect of this same concept, I never ever paid for any string of bits in my life, and never will. [my italics]
You sound proud of that! So, you're not a musician or artist or writer etc etc, then – I can't imagine any of those saying that. Calling something "a string of bits" to make it sound valueless is a strange trick.
> "This is not the same as Napster" - It's the same thing.
I think Alexandra's point is a good one – they are essentially different:
"The problem is that publishers are not actual creators of these works, scientists are – they do all the work, and academic publishers simply use their position of power in the Republic of Science to extract unjust profits. Sci-Hub does not enable piracy where creative people are deprived of the reward they deserve. It is a very different thing."
Scihub and Napster are "the same thing", in the sense that both are tools that were created to enable the peer to peer sharing of information, one bypasses the journals middlemen, the other the record labels. Information is meant to be free, anything that tries to stop it is going against the nature of info. The way I see it's like trying to stop entropy, good luck trying to create your perpetual motion machine.
You are then saying Amazon and Ebay are the same as The Silk Road.
They are marketplaces, but from an ethical standpoint they are vastly different.
You cannot stop piracy but a different thing is saying music piracy is legitimate. You are conflating different things.
If you don't understand the difference between Napster and Scihub you probably think music piracy is OK. It is not.
First of all, scholars themselves use Scihub and most scholars that do not have a conflict of interest disagree with how companies like Elsevier operate.
I think music piracy is more than OK, it is good. I also understand the distinction you are trying to make and it is a makes sense. Journals add nothing. Musicians, producers, and other technicians do work to make music.
1) They restrict access to research with paywalls.
2) The research they publish is usually funded with public funds. Governments do not get money from journals.
3) The work being published is produced by researchers. Researchers do not get any money from the journals.
4) Journals rarely verify what they publish.
So, in short, Sci-Hub is a necessary disobedience movement that aims to end with the most pointless institution in academia: paid journals.
This is not the same as Napster.