If you're thinking of the scientists and students in your society as "customers" and not as scientists and students...
You are optimizing for the wrong thing (i e. You are optimizing for the benefit to capital, not for the benefit to society)
In the mean time, however, we live in a market economy where publishers exist, and they are a business. Of course they are interested in customers, and yes, they would be scientists and students.
Am I saying that that's the best way to organize academic publishing? No. What I'm saying is that I don't see any justification for circumventing paywalls within a society that adheres to certain laws and regulations.
I believe in a system where the people can critically assess and evaluate all laws and regulations and has the power to get them changed. I don't believe in a system where people can just pick the laws and regulations that suit them and choose to ignore the other ones.
Fair. For the record, I don't believe in neither of the two systems that you describe, or rather... I don't think that those descriptions are meaningful.
i.e. you describe what "people can" do... you might intend "can" to mean: "have the ultimate power to", but to me that's obviously untrue (if people had the ultimate power to change regulations for the better, gerrymandering wouldn't exist, if people had the ultimate power to ignore law and regulations, police wouldn't exist).
What you describe could be true if you mean "can" to be "are allowed to". But obviously people are never allowed to do something as a blanket rule... and thus those statements are less universal, and much less interesting (People can change laws and regulations, as long as they have the support of mass media and the establishment. People can ignore law, as long as LEA turn a blind eye to it)
What is more interesting, is defining what people -should- do.
If people can critically assess all laws and regulations, should they change them?
Unjust laws are obviously not being repealed. Is that the people relinquishing their responsibility, or are there roadblocks preventing that? Who has the power to stop them? How can we empower the people?
If people think that laws are unjust, should they ignore them?
Is that good for society? How do you protect people who are doing civil disobedience?
I certainly mean the first reading of "can", as in "to be able to". You are right, though, that in reality, there are no absolutes. However, by and large, of course people who live in a democracy absolutely have the power to cause societal change - it's just that it's not an easy process and there are certainly parties who are interested in roadblocking this ability for their own benefits.
As for your list of questions toward the end, I have opinions on a number of them. As I'm sure you might have too. A small text box on HN is probably not going to do it for a thorough discussion, though, I suggest we take ourselves a couple of thousands years of time and enough tea to make any progress on them at all.
[1] Two provisos: the costs of professional publishing a journal is per-issue; perhaps, per-paper. Not per-copy. A pay-to-publish model would put incentives in the right place, but is fraught with a whole stack of conflicts of interest. Which is being actively exploited. So, ... yeah.
Second, the consumer-pays model actively hurts researchers themselves, who would like to see their research disseminated as widely as possible. "If I do research funded by UK tax money and publish it, should that paper be freely available to Americans too, or only to UK tax payers?" Want to bet what researchers' answer to that question would be?
Fortunately for me, I was a computer scientist. In that field, researchers (almost?) universally make their papers freely available, often in complete disregard of their publishing venue's rules (with no consequences). So, to medicine and physics and what-not, I can only say phtththp.
But… what does a publisher actually do?
Peer review is mostly a requirement but some have professional editors as well, which is a paid position. Costs for OA journals are almost always borne by those successful at getting through the process which means that any costs are related also to the rate of rejection. For journals groups like Nature, that may mean an OA cost paying ~10-20x the actual cost (plus profit margin) due to a high rejection rate.
Broadly the reason this has stuck around so long is that what publishers are assigning to journals is a vague notion of trust. They are incentivised to keep "high quality" articles in their list as that's what people want to be listed in. The recent discussions around reproducibility tie in with discussions around clickbait news, in that the incentive of citations is not identical to the incentive of quality.
Peer review isn't free to do either despite one part of the labour being free, PeerJ increasing their costs is a good overview of this.
(disclaimer - work for a company (digital science) that's related to publishing in that we analyse and combine the data, and we're owned by a larger publishing house (holtzbrinck) but I have no horse in this game myself)
What's wrong with "circumventing" paywalls?
17 U.S.C. § 107
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies … for purposes such as … scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
Could this not be said about Sci-Hub itself?
The purpose of copyright is to enrich public access to creative works. So bypassing of paywalls, regardless of whether it was publicly or privately funded, should be judged against that measure. It does not seem that researchers will stop writing papers just because of a drop in publisher revenue, regardless of the source of funding.
Bypassing of paywalls could be judged against many measures.
I don't understand why the publishers get all the blame while no-one talks about the scientists who choose to publish their works behind a paywall.
Why not?
"[T]he question posed is whether a hypothetical monopolist can profitably impose a small but significant and non-transitory increase in price in the product market as defined. If the answer to the question posed is yes, and the price increase would be profitable for the hypothetical monopolist, then the market is correctly defined, and from here the analysis could go forward to determining whether antitrust laws are being violated if the company at issue has too much market power." (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/hypothetical_monopolist_test)
Analogies are often not very useful but consider this: there's this traffic light close to my house and even though there's usually not much traffic, the red phase is much, much longer than any other light I've ever waited at. I don't know what they were thinking but it's crazy long. I go there multiple times each day and I don't want to know how much of my life I already wasted just waiting at that light. For me personally that is into "unethical" territory, so I started just running that red light now. I make sure, though, that I only do it when there's no chance for an accident. I'm very much in favor of solving the issue through different ways long-term, but until then, meh. But YMMV of course.
Maybe here's a better one: there's this really good bakery close to my house. They make everything fresh from scratch, and the smell alone when you walk by is absolutely amazing. Their croissants especially are to die for and there's usually long lines in the morning. I love them too, because they're really heavenly but they come at a price point. I mean, it's always been a bit more than I could/should afford but they're so good! But last month, they even raised the price by another pound. It's actually quite ridiculous now - I mean, do they make their croissants out of gold? There should be a law against such prices! And I know that each day, they have to throw out a handful of croissants at the end of the day that they couldn't sell, probably because of the high price?! For me personally that is into "unethical" territory, so now I just started quickly running into the bakery, grabbing one of the croissants and booking it. That saves me a lot of money, and I can enjoy those beautiful goods again, hmm! I'm very much in favor of solving the issue through different ways long-term, but until then, meh. But YMMV of course.
Sci-hub is more like making a copy of the recipe than stealing the croissant. Making a copy doesn't deprive anyone of the original.
I had a feeling that the previous comment would possibly not be well received. My intention was not to make a strawman argument - that's why I added a clear caveat about the limited usefulness of analogies.
The point was perhaps a bit childish, I admit, but then again, the HN audience is very diverse with many different backgrounds. Many may be intimately familiar with academic realities, others might not and simply get triggered by the old "evil publishing corporation against freedom of information" trope.
The two examples were meant to target the latter end of the spectrum, and judging from your comment, they probably failed at what I had in mind: to allude to the fact that there a multiple parties involved here and they are coming from different perspectives and they have different interests in mind. That's where the analogies end, of course.
Sci-Hub is certainly convenient. But convenience does not justify everything.
P.S.: A potential evidence that my point about the different backgrounds of the HN crowd may have been correct is the fact that my "analogies" post is the only one that has more upvotes than downvotes.
As scientists, I think we should be held to especially high moral standards. And there are two questions one should be allowed to ask:
1. Is is right to publish research results funded by tax money behind a paywall? 2. Is it right to circumvent a paywall to access publicly funded research results?
And to me, the answer to 2. is imply 'no'. I know that most people, especially here on HN, do not agree with that view. Perhaps they might think that a 'yes' would immediately follow from a 'no' to question 1.
But I don't think it does, and I'm not even sure my answer to question 1 would be a 'no'. Perhaps one could think about another question first: should researchers turn to a professional publisher to get their research published, and I think at least some years ago there wasn't much else you could do. Now, of course, there are digital platforms such as arxiv but their acceptance also depends vastly on your field. In any event, such platforms can also be thought of as a publisher, anyway. The main service provided is organizational: publishers don't review the research contents (they're not qualified for that) but they organize external reviewers; publishers provide discoverability because they are a well-defined source known to the community. Are there alternatives to that type of work? Sure! But there is an added value in what a publisher does.
So then in a follow-up question, we can ask whether a publisher should be compensated for their work. And to me, it is pretty clear that they should be. Of course, there are different ways this could be implemented but that decision is up to the one running the business, ie., the publisher. I can think of more customer-friendly ways than to make me pay for every single download of a paper. On the other hand, there are lots of other businesses where I don't like the way they make money - tough luck for me, I guess.
Now, I think this last point is very important, especially before you go and hit that downvote button (unless you already have): I can think of better ways (for me!) how research publishing should be realized. But I don't think that from that it follows that I should be able to or even have the moral right to circumvent publisher paywalls.
Perhaps it's wrong to charge for access to publicly funded research results but I don't think the second wrong of circumventing publisher paywalls makes that right.
Oh, and here's a little subtlety I don't see discussed very often: if I do research funded by UK tax money and publish it, should that paper be freely available to Americans too, or only to UK tax payers?