In addition to highlighting the new policy, this topic is a good place to comment, ask questions, and discuss. In that vein, I would like to set the legal and risk management aspects of this policy to the side for a moment and comment personally on the ethical aspects of consuming and sharing content owned by academic journals. I recognize the ethical validity of copyright generally, and I happily pay for books, music, and video content to do my part to ensure that there are incentives for authors and artists to continue to create.The second notable change involves the posting of protected content. It has come to Management’s attention - ahem - that certain papers otherwise found only behind paywalls have been uploaded to the forums. While we sympathize with the indignity of being denied free access to research results that in many cases have been funded publicly, this is not purely an ethical issue. Hosting protected content in the forums exposes ApoE4.Info, Inc. to legal and financial risk.
Going forward, we’re going to comply fully with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Please don’t upload papers that are not freely available, and please don’t link directly to them on Sci-Hub or any other infringing repositories. Note that under fair use doctrine those of us who obtain personal access to a paper can share incisive excerpts for discussion purposes.
The Moderation Team will edit posts as necessary to remove infringing content and replace it with a generic suggestion that members in jurisdictions for which access to Sci-Hub is legal search for the paper there. We can link to the sci-hub.bz landing page - we just can’t link directly to protected content.
In my personal opinion, not to be confused with that of ApoE4.Info, Inc., today the academic journals play an anachronistic and parasitic role in the research dissemination ecosystem. I recognize the lawfulness but not the equity or moral legitimacy of their claims on research findings that in most cases were financed with public money. I'm not alone - the scientific community is in full-fledged revolt against the journals. I won't belabor this point, but I will share a sampling of articles on this topic from Science, Wired, TechCrunch, Science Alert, Washington Post, Nature, and Big Think (and the 2 minute video of Aaron Swartz explaining the core moral issue is worth viewing also).
Finally, I want to share a list of updates we made to bring the site into compliance with the new policy. We reviewed all prior attachments and deleted 57. (From context we know that there were more, but attachments prior to November 2014 were corrupted long ago, so we didn't spend the time to remove them.) For reference, below are the 51 edited posts that no longer contain the 57 infringing attachments.
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