Piracy: are you for freely available science?

Question

"There is little dispute that Sci-Hub, the website that provides free access to millions of proprietary academic papers, is illegal. Yet, despite being successfully sued twice by major American academic publishers for massive copyright infringement, the site continues to operate."
For anyone who's not familiar, a lot of medical / scientific journals are pay-to-read. Alexandra Elbakyan is a russian woman who created SciHub, a way to break into pay walls and unlock articles.
IMPORTANT: the researchers do NOT get money from publishing their findings. They're not paid. Some journals, you have to pay a fee to publish. That's why I think a lot of authors gladly give you a copy of their paper if you email them about it when facing paywalls.
(Recommended read: "The highly profitable but unethical business of publishing medical research" J R Soc Med. 2006 Sep; 99(9): 452–456)
Another good source for this type of "business" is Library Genesis and BookFi, which is the same principle but you can also download college textbooks 
Do you use or have you used them in the past? Are you for it or against it? For those who went to college before (I'm aware you have to buy specific books for certain degrees in the US), would you still pay for the books or you'd wish you knew about LibGen?

Answer

Hmm with the courses I’ve taken, the school would give students free access to published journals.
I’ve read horror stories about publishers rejecting the work of “no-names” but then going on to steal the research and publish it for themselves under a different name.
I believe the peer review process is necessary though... I wouldn’t mind taxes being used to make science available and accessible to the general public and I think it should be available & accessible to all.  I’m not sure, tbh, if I’d knowingly use the sites that pirate..

Answer

I’d access it if I could for work, but they have it blocked. 🤷🏻‍♀️
If I know the authors’ contact, I’d email them to request the article. 
I could never afford to pay for a singular article let alone a subscription. For my thesis, each article of the dozens I cited was at least $50. Thankfully my university had all the major subscription services that I could access. 
The knowledge gatekeeping is so expensive in academia. I understand that people put a lot of labor and work into doing research, but it’s expensive and not everyone can afford to pay. Plus, I am listed as an author for an article, and I don’t see a dime for people buying the thing.

Answer

Yes but sadly it’s not going to be that way unless some major organization is stablished. 
Nature, and PubMed, are great free journals. If a journal is there, you know it’s breakthrough stuff! There’s more sites I use but I think they are pay to view, my college offers a lot of them for free. 
We need big companies to handle this type of material because otherwise it would lose its merit. Anyone could post handful or idiotic information and most wouldn’t be the wiser (unless you are an expert). 
There is a lot of stealing and copying and forging in the scientific world already, we don’t need fake info as well. 
PubMed is how I found out Covid was extremely scary. There was a cool article in March with autopsies of bodies that showed clots all over the body that can lead to organ failure/damage and of course death. So if you survive chances are your body will never be the same and you could live with complications for the rest of your life.

Answer

i mean, idk if i’m right but students already fork out a lot of money to pay for their course text books. i bought 3 earlier this week and it was £93 in total and that was only for one module. 
i think the courteous thing to do, would be to email the researchers themselves to see if you can get a free copy directly from them. but honestly, i’d be more likely to use a site such as sci-hub purely because my anxiety always flares up when it comes to contacting strangers. like i’d just think of so many scenarios where they respond with a bunch of abuse or something 😅
since the money doesn’t even go to the researchers, i wouldn’t really feel guilty 😬
but if anyone has had research journals published and has a different opinion, let me know cuz i’d love to hear a different perspective on this

Answer

I do think they should be freely available, but we do need a way to discern quality peer-reviewed papers from junk science.  Right now, journals provide some of that through their peer review process and pressure to maintain their reputation.

Answer

I do support this. Especially when we look at how costs of access to databases have exploded in recent years. I’d be fine with minimal fees for operational costs, but it’s exploitive at this point. Same with college texts books. They’ve become just another way to gouge students out of their loan money.

Answer

Knowledge should be available to everyone. Most authors will gladly send you a copy for free anyways. Most people just don't know that or don't want to contact them (social anxiety and all that). I don't have a problem with it.

Answer

I dream of the day that access to knowledge is viewed as important and as essential to life as food and shelter.  The only reason to not freely share knowledge is to try and dominate/or control the have nots.

Answer

I havent used them when i was in college....and i still wouldnt use them because i like my physical books to study on, write on, underline and highlight -it is just so pleasurable to highlight stuff idk 😁

Piracy: are you for freely available science?

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