Marcell Mars aka Nenad Romic on Sun, 6 Dec 2015 18:19:31 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Science Hub


it's interesting, except for disseminating the letter quoting the
snippets, that when letter provoked some discussion it was mostly a
developing into strong advocacy for open access and blaming commercial
publishers and/or scientists who work with them.

consumer boycott, as the form of resistance, is still beloved by the
global northwest. a fantasy that if enough of us, individual
consumers, gather together, coordinate and then redirect or allocate
our consuming power resources some evil power will be shut down. even
most of us know that structural problems are hardest, if not
impossible, to subvert this way. together with that, in the particular
case of scientific publishing deadlock we face these days, there is a
belief and confidence, resonating with arguably successful story of
free software, that we can rebuild the world of (software,) science
and knowledge in parallel with the dominant one by forking our
production from these axes of (dominant) evil.

capitalist periphery doesn't have that confidence nor beliefs (not for
that kind of resistance nor for the production capacity).  for that
periphery, digital networks are one of few, if not the only, global
infrastructure where if empowered by libgen, sci-hub, ubu, aaaaarg or
monoskop one could feel everything is (still sort of) all right. you
read, write and execute. download and upload.

intention of the letter was first to express the solidarity with
libgen and sci-hub, most of the time separate in the internet island
of russian language and (sub)culture(s). another goal was to invite
people (dear fellow custodians) to build the solidarity (safe) network
for the future struggles. which unavoidably is coming soon.

the biggest surprise for me was that many people were asking for (more
concrete) call for action. i have to admit i felt it is trivial and
obvious what are the actions, it's download/upload, and what are the
places these actions are happening. will try to address that in the
follow ups.

i believe that open access is important and relevant but it also
reminds me on the whole creative commons enthusiasm which badly failed
in the past.

On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 5:01 AM, Tapas Ray <tapasrayx@yandex.com> wrote:

> In the past, I have published papers in for-profit journals (Sage,
> Intellect), and a book through a university press. Subsequently, when I
> came across the argument attributed here to a former director of Harvard
> Library, I decided to publish papers ONLY in open-access journals and
> books ONLY through independent or university publishers. I have offered
> my latest paper to a peer-reviewed open-access journal. I am either
> working on, or will be working on in the next few months, four edited
> volumes and a monograph, and have requested the publications consultant
> of my Institute to offer these exclusively to independent publishers. I
> am a latecomer to the academy and my output is small, hence the impact
> of my decision cannot but be negligible. But if other academics also
> were to do what I am doing, change would come. That is my hope/belief..
>
> In solidarity,
>
> Tapas
 <...>


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