Complexity and Misrepresentation in the New York Times | The Scholarly Kitchen

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-03-17

Summary:

"Reading the Sunday New York Times on 13th March I came across an article by Kate Murphy, entitled 'Should All Research papers be Free?', that looked at the activist Alexandra Elbakayan’s fight “for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology”. Let me preface my comments in this post by saying that I am not an advocate – either against or for open access. Having said this, when an article is written and published like this I find myself bubbling with irritation at the level of bias and misrepresentation that permeated this piece. For starters the piece neglected to mention that Elbakayan’s Sci-Hub violates existing law — as such, it is illegal. The author may agree, or disagree about whether it should be illegal, but the fact remains that it currently is illegal. At the end of 2015, Sci-Hub — Elbakayan’s creation — was ordered to be taken down by a New York District court. A number of articles have been written here in the Kitchen that discuss Sci-Hub itself (here, here, and here). Because it is currently hosted in Russia, Elbakayan does not recognize the jurisdiction of such a court. Instead, she suggests that the big publishers, especially Elsevier who brought a lawsuit against Sci-Hub, are the ones with an illegal business model. I do not want to put myself between Elbakayan and Elsevier – a recipe for making Robert Harington resembling some nasty ratatouille by the time both sides have finished with me. My main beef with the New York Times article is that this part of the story was not fully articulated. There are comments made that imply Editors are not paid. In fact, depending on the field and journal we are talking about, Editors may well be paid quite handsomely, with buy-outs on teaching time a common occurrence. How to reward reviewers effectively is certainly something that many publishers recognize is an issue that needs to be addressed, though it is also true to say that for many this is part of their contribution to their academic community ..."

Link:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/16/complexity-and-misrepresentation-in-the-new-york-times/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.litigation oa.takedowns oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.sci-hub oa.piracy oa.debates oa.libre oa.guerrilla

Date tagged:

03/17/2016, 08:48

Date published:

03/17/2016, 04:48