[CydeWeys]

I think Aaron would've been happy with the developments in the field of scientific publishing over the last half decade, had he been able to see them. I've specifically got Sci-Hub in mind here. Sure, it's not exactly legal, but everyone uses it regardless.

[SwellJoe]

I think Aaron had more than a little to do with those changes. I'm certain he inspired many within the academic world to think about where and how they published in ways they may not have in the past and helped trigger the pushback from public organizations that sponsor research in recent years. And, there have been numerous technical runs at the problem that were very likely inspired by Aaron's work.

It's getting better, but not by accident. People like Aaron made it get better.

[pazimzadeh]

It's too bad Aaron and Alexandra Elbakyan never met. They might have made a good team.

[jacquesm]

She's currently in hiding after Elsevier won an injunction. There's one company I'll be very happy to see the last of.

[stryk]

I still don't see why all the scientific paper publishing stuff is allowed to work in the way that it does. I mean, don't a large % of the people doing that research use funding from government grants? If public money was used to produce the research, then the public should have free and available access to it -- we already paid for it.

[jacquesm]

Ostensibly you are not paying Elsevier to access the research, you are paying them because they obtained the right to copy the paper.

That's the loophole that many of the writers use to publish pre-prints from their own homepages. That did not stop the publishers from suing them:

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elsevier-versus-open-access

[sapper123]

Is the right to copy the paper an agreement between universities and the publisher? If so, can't the universities just give a middle finger to the publisher, cancel those rights and allow the research to be publicized for free, in the interest of furthering research, or is money that they get from the publisher that significant?

[Vinnl]

No, it's an agreement between researchers and the publishers, and the researchers feel dependent on the publisher for their careers (publishing in "high impact" journals is good for it), so they often blindly accept whichever terms the publisher shoves down their throats.

And no, no real money from the publisher is involved.

[marvy]

I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm pretty sure they get no money at all from the publishers. Other way around in fact: their libraries spend large fraction of budget subscribing to the journals.

[kilotaras]

Public need doesn't always align with individuals incentives.

Public wants new high-quality, available knowledge. Individual researcher are incentivized to publish often and in high impact journals. This in turn leads to both lower quality research (see replication crisis) and preservation of status quo in publishing.

[Vinnl]

It's not so much allowed to as well as that it's hard to change (although there's a lot of attempts to). A long-read on how it got this way at [1], and a shorter summary of why it won't change at [2] (which I wrote).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

[2] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

[Vinnl]

Well, "in hiding" doesn't mean that much, I think. She's originally from Kazakhstan or Russia and, thus, can't really be touched by US court rulings. She probably shouldn't visit the US or many other countries, but otherwise probably hasn't had to change her lifestyle that much.

[dgroshev]

They won't because they have widely different worldviews. For one, Aaron believed in freedom, while Alexandra did it literally for the glory of Motherland. Please don't buy into the simplistic narrative pushed by most Western outlets, Alexandra is Putin's fan who vehemently represses any discerning voice on platforms she controls. Like, a few months back she outright banned Russian IPs from accessing sci-hub over what she perceived as a personal insult [1]. This is very, very different from what I know about Aaron.

Tangential: the way she's covered by Western media is such a crying shame.

[1]: https://medium.com/@alexandraborissova/sci-hub-banned-in-rus...