[blue_dinner]

Just like with music and file sharing, this will not hurt the large corporations. It will only hurt the researchers that depend on these papers for funding and make it more difficult for them to make a living in the future.

It will also push companies to keep research more private and proprietary. Why would I spend millions of dollars on research, only to have it freely distributed to everyone, including my potential competitors?

I've never witnesses a time where more people fight to give up more and more of their own power and hand it over to governments and large corporations on a silver platter...and then complain when it's all gone.

[gradschool]

Are you aware that unlike musicians, academic researchers don't get paid royalties on their publications? A list of prestigious publications on one's cv leads to funding and job opportunities regardless of whether anyone pays to read them.

[maxerickson]

Lots of academics are collecting royalties on books.

Typically not large royalties, but they are collecting them.

[merraksh]

Of the 100 academicians I know (applied math), only a dozen published books and collect royalties. Some of them joke about getting the occasional check of a few dollars every year. These are senior US professors whose salary is good enough that they can joke about the royalties.

[gradschool]

Yes, that's a fair point. I was thinking only of journal articles and conference proceedings. One way of making money off textbooks is to be a professor in an institution with a large number of students and make them a requirement for the course. It also helps to make a few small changes every year and call it a new edition, so each year the next class of students has to buy new ones instead of used copies from the previous year's class. I question whether this practice is worth defending.

[SCHiM]

> Yes, that's a fair point. I was thinking only of journal articles and conference proceedings. One way of making money off textbooks is to be a professor in an institution with a large number of students

Yeah that behaviour is detestable. Absolutely utterly unethical and everyone who engages in this type of behaviour should take a long look in the mirror and realize that there's an Evil person looking back.

I've lost so much money to f*ckers like this and I have no recourse, it makes me so mad I can spit.

[MichaelBurge]

The professors don't actually make much money. The publisher takes a huge commission. I've heard 5-10% royalties in some cases. Usually if they use the book for their own course they'll waive even that to avoid having the appearance of a conflict of interest.

They could make a ton of money doing it this way: Physics textbooks can sell for hundreds. But many don't.

Using your own book for a course(separate from the money) has its benefits: The book has exactly the content that you want to teach off of, and you can also choose good problems.

When I took a Differential Geometry course in college, the professor had a translated version of some paper from a Russian mathematician back in the 1950s that he taught off of. It was cheaper to get copies from Kinko's, and it's not like the math changes. The old pioneers can sometimes give better intuition too.

[namlem]

On books, not papers. I've searched for books on sci-hub, but have never found one. I'm pretty sure it's all papers, which researchers make no money on.

[chrismonsanto]

Use Library Genesis (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/) for books.