Ranting thoughts about libraries and humanity
The idea of a library having physical media as a necessity is so incredibly archaic and it’s silly to relegate them to a historical phenomenon that will cease to exist soon.
A library isn’t “a place you can rent books for free,” it’s a free community resource for cultural and intellectual development. Librarians aren’t shelf-stockers and cashiers. They’re professionals in providing information services and improving availability and accessibility for all who use libraries.
In a time where we have the physical capacity to provide copies of these resources to the entire world for essentially free, why on earth *should* we be bound to rules established by bourgeois interests decades, if not hundreds, of years ago?
Why is it that so many people are willing to limit user-side computing to essentially marketing-spyware, skinner-boxes, and movie/tv show rentals? How can people stare at the infinite reproduction machine that you can sustain via sunlight and say “middleman have bills to pay too.” Come on. Stop being so servile to people that would rather you die than not give them money.
Consider the scale of global intellectual and cultural development and enrichment we’ve been leaving on the table for decades. Requiring an income from the imperial core just to *individually* access so many of these resources legally can only serve western-chauvinist interests. Thank you to Alexandra #elbakyan for such a massive uplifting of the global south by creating an avenue to free access to incredible amounts of scientific research. Her (illegal) actions benefit billions of people, and you need to ask yourself if giving large sums of money to #Elsevier is worth the tradeoff.
All of that is being hampered to subsidize a predatory industry that exploits the authors they cynically “defend.” Rentseeking parasites will lie to you about their business practices because they are financially motivated to do so. You want authors to make a living in our current economic system? Salary them.
Furthermore, they focus almost exclusively on publishing what is marketable and frequently make editorial decisions based on that marketing. All of this serves to reinforce bourgeois cultural hegemony and limits the scope of creativity/exploration to fit within those boundaries. The liberal idea of “the free exchange of ideas” is such a farce. It’s embarrassing to take seriously.
Our human development is being stifled, and we’re all worse off for it. If this doesn’t change we’re going to continue to writhe in a dark age compared to what we could have.
Update. This new preprint by Alexandra #Elbakyan works well as the preface to her Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge, even though it came out afterwards.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202409.0197/v1
"A possible solution might be to sign a new declaration on #OpenAccess to knowledge in sciences and humanities, where recent technological
advances will be recognized and challenges discussed, such as legal status of new platforms."
The aim of this article is to shed some light on ‘black open access’ model, that still remains poorly understood and largely neglected in the literature, despite being widely adopted in practice. I give an overview of the historical development of black OA and its most important projects: Sci-Hub and Library Genesis. Arguments are provided for why the term ‘black OA’ is misleading and the term ‘RGB OA’ (red, green and blue) would better describe a diverse landscape of open access projects that emerged after 2001. While practical approaches towards OA evolved dramatically in the past 20 years, theoretical discussion is still operating the same two-color scheme of ‘green’ and ‘gold’ open access from BOAI declaration of 2001: novel approaches are either not recognized as OA at all or are neglected as ‘black’. A new and more inclusive OA declaration might be needed to account for greater diversity of approaches.
Has anyone seen an English translation of Alexandra #Elbakyan's Declaration on #OpenAccess to Scientific Knowledge?
Here's the Russian original.
https://open.science.do/
Here's the blog post where I learned about it.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dkochetkov_%D0%BC%D1%8B-activity-7227224413719461888-sdrz
I can't find a translation already online. Google Translate chokes on it. (Why?) DeepL says it's too long to translate on a free account.
Is anyone willing to make and post an English translation?
For its creator Alexandra Elbakyan, the Sci-Hub pirate library is the most radical and successful take on open access to date. But Sci-Hub may not actually be about open access at all.
See Robot Review of Books: #8 Sci-Hub vs Open Access for more.
https://www.robotreviewofbooks.org/
#ai #artificialintelligence #genai #publishing #video #robot #books #bookreview #experimentalwriting #piracy #scihub #OpenAccess #oa #elbakyan
“In rete esistono molte iniziative di re-distribuzione gratuita della conoscenza. Tra queste ci sono Z-Library, Library Genesis e, appunto, shi-hub che permette l’accesso a milioni di documenti scientifici.”
#comunismo #conoscenza #Elbakyan #openaccess #scienza #ShiHub
continua @ https://www.antiper.org/2024/07/27/elbakyan-comunismo-shihub-conoscenza/
L'attuale sistema di produzione di conoscenza nella scienza è un classico esempio di sistema capitalista fallito. I ricercatori vengono sfruttati e non ricevono denaro per il loro lavoro: la conoscenza che producono sotto forma di articoli di ricerca non appartiene a loro. E non appartiene nemmeno alle persone. Invece, la conoscenza nella scienza oggi è una proprietà privata di poche potenti aziende, che ne ricavano enormi quantità di denaro
El PIRATE BAY de los CIENTÍFICOS
Alexandra #Elbakyan -
A Robin Hood na #Ciência -
twitter.com/camat_usp/status/1… -
facebook.com/ernesto.crespo/po… -
RT @camat_usp - Via Ernesto Crespo - #SciHub #Copyright #AlexandraElbakyan -
🫵 Quem é Alexandra Elbakyan?🤔 Veja 4 motivos pelo qual escolhemos homenagear Alexandra: 1. Ela é a criadora do SciHub. Homenagear o SciHub é um dever nosso, pois se trata da ferramenta mais importante no que diz respeito ao acesso a conhecimento científico. 🧶Continua
The Library of Alexandra
"We travel to Kazakhstan to meet the mysterious woman behind it all and to find out what it takes to make everything we know about anything available to anyone anywhere, for free."
https://radiolab.org/podcast/library-alexandra
#SciHub #ShadowLibrary #ShadowLibraries #OpenAccess #elbakyan
1/2
The Piracy Years: Internet File Sharing in a Global Context, ed. Michael High, Markus Heidingsfelder and Holger Briel has now been published. It contains ‘How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’, which is available open access.
Elbakyan of course recently won the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/eff-award-winner-alexandra-asanova-elbakyan
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