[gravypod]

Something that came up often when talking to people at my college was that our extremely expensive contracts with publishers/journals were to support the complex infrastructure required to maintain a service like that. We're talking multi million dollars per year per university per journal contracts.

Reviewers are volunteers. Hosting costs, as shown by Sci-Hub, are negligible. How much does it cost to replicate a file system across 5 to 10 data centers, have a 10G link to each data center, and run a few nodes to serve web traffic?

Probably a small fraction of the budgets we pay for journals.

> P.S. Seed its torrents!

I know no one will give legal advice here but: is this legal to do?

[huijzer]

"A reminder that Elsevier made $6 BILLION selling your academic journals and articles behind paywalls, and made more profit than Amazon, Google and Apple every year for YEARS...

And paid the academics who wrote the articles $0 And paid the reviewers of the articles $0"

Source: https://twitter.com/DrJessTaylor/status/1390798132632596488?...

[matheusmoreira]

> our extremely expensive contracts with publishers/journals were to support the complex infrastructure required to maintain a service like that

> Hosting costs, as shown by Sci-Hub, are negligible

Yes. The truth is these problems and costs are created by the copyright industry. Since copying is illegal, they have set themselves up as the only legal source for this material and that requires a lot of storage and bandwidth.

All they have to do is place their copyrighted works in the public domain. The storage and distribution problems will solve themselves immediately and at zero cost to them. People will literally do their work for them.

[londons_explore]

> Probably a small fraction of the budgets we pay for journals.

Well motivated enthusiasts in their free time can achieve 100x what middle-grade 'digital consultants' can do in the same time...

Building sci-hub in a corporate world, even leaving out the legal issues, would be very expensive. Begin by thinking how many 30 person meetings you're going to need to have to decide how to arrange the tender process...

[whimsicalism]

Seeding copyrighted content? No, not legal.

[jamiek88]

Eyes wide open and all that but civil disobedience is a thing.

[PoignardAzur]

Oh come on. Obviously GP was answering the question about legality, not talking about ethics.

[whimsicalism]

Right you are. If you’re going to seed, I would recommend a seedbox.

[HomeDeLaPot]

Do what's right, whether it's legal or not.

[bellyfullofbac]

In Germany you'll get sued very quickly for offering others' copyrighted content, there's a whole industry there of lawyers mailing you that you've violated their clients' (copyright holders) rights but if you pay the around 1000 Euroes "damages" and sign a letter agreeing to not violate their rights again it'll go away. If they catch you seeding/uploading a part of another of their copyrighted content, then they'll ask for even more money.

So if you think seeding is the right thing, you'll probably end up really broke and unable to pay your bills there.

The other side of this are lawyers profiting off people who get these letters and charging money for basically copy-pasted emails on how to respond.

[Jiocus]

Without the copyright holders permission, that is.

There are many things available through e.g bittorrent because the author made it so.

[superkuh]

That's true. Putting tax funded research studies behind corporate paywalls also is in many contexts and jurisdictions. But it's funny how that one doesn't ever get prosecuted.

[whimsicalism]

In what jurisdictions is elsevier breaking the law?

I think the way intellectual property law works is bad, but afaik they are operating within the law as it stands now.