I don’t know about specifically a torrent structure, but this exists otherwise, and it’s called arXiv.
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Hopefully not. If UC’s policy people actually talk with the users/authors, they will get an earful about how much Elsevier is hated. It’s a problem solved by critical mass; if enough large systems/institutions stop playing ball, Elsevier’s business model will simply dissolve. Open access journals are gaining size and reputation, and journals like PLOS will eventually supplant the Elseviers, Springers and Wileys.
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There is a misconception that the scientific publisher’s primary purpose is distribution of the content. That’s not quite true. The best journals provide a valuable service to the researcher because they act as a filter - if your research was poorly designed and your data unreliable, and your conclusions are not supported by your evidence, you won’t be able to get published in a top journal. If you are a busy doctor, you can’t read every one of the thousands of articles published every week. But if you read the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, you can rest assured that you have seen the most important, impactful research to inform your clinical care.
The peer review process helps the researcher validate their conclusions. Journals employ statisticians to check data, and the editorial staff also help improve the way the research is presented. Free “Open access” journals have fallen under criticism for being a very weak filter, and have been caught approving fake research papers for publication.
Publishers also act as stewards. Tracking article citations, ensuring that articles are discover-able in indexes like PubMed and Google Scholar. The author may be engaged in those concerns now, but what about 50 years from now? 100 years from now?
Just another perspective to consider.
(Full disclosure: I don’t work in publishing now, but in a past life I worked with and for some of the big-name scientific publishers in the US)
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As have for-profit publishers. But on to another of your assertions:
While the best journals do have editors which screen for promising manuscripts to review (and occasionally solicit manuscripts for special topic issues), the journals do not perform peer review—that “filter” you mentioned—period. The journals coordinate peer review, but peer review is actually performed by scholars unpaid by the journal publishers, who are more or less drawn from a pool of the same scholars who write the articles without financial recompense.
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As a ‘consumer’/student/researcher, my problem is that I have to know about your paper in order to contact you, then i have to find your contact details, then I have to find your current contact details, then I have to contact you, then I have to wait an indeterminate amount of time based on timezones, conference schedules, leave plans, weekends, inclination to share, etc.
Or I can just use the varsity library website and get the kinds of things I’m after in 10-15 minutes, regardless of time of day and what you’re up to.
Elsevier and the rest are parasites, just like the rest of the DRM enabled ecosphere. However, the service they provide is - in principal - very useful.
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Authors typically have to grant exclusive rights to the publisher, so, contractually, they are usually barred from doing what it is you’re suggesting. In the days before email and the internet, that was a fairly effective tactic in terms of limiting distribution. But! This sort of nonsense means nothing to the internet. So, given the fact that it exists in this day and age, and that COMPUTERS ARE EXTREMELY ADEPT AT COPYING INFORMATION ENDLESSLY, Elsevier and all other publishers of textual information are in the same sinking boat. You want a published scientific article that you can’t afford? There are many avenues you can pursue to make it happen.
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Hahahaha…oh. Yeah, probably not.
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As someone who used to work for a for-profit scientific publisher, you then also know that they do things that would make record labels and Hollywood film studios blush. Let’s see - they get paid by the content creators, they get paid by the content consumers, and they don’t pay their reviewers. Much of the content they get paid to publish was funded by public money, reviewed by people who are paid with public money, and paid for at the end by, you guessed it, public money.
A good review by the Guardian, that gets one key fact quite wrong: it says that authors provide content for free, when in fact they often pay the journal to be published.
Elsevier has 24% of the market, with Springer and Wiley holding the rest of that half of the total. Elsevier has 36-40% profit margins.
A danger that hasn’t really been discussed: with the profit motive, the for-profit publishers are more corruptible. If they start getting pinched, will they accept it, or will they start taking money from industry (pharma, oil & gas, healthcare, etc) to manipulate the publication of science toward vested interests? Or has that already begun?
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However, courts have ruled that authors can send pre-publication copies to whomever they want. So as long as your draft isn’t terribly far off the final version, you’re good to go.
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Not if it’s theirs to publish. It’s perfectly legal to use BitTorrent to distribute anything you have the rights to.
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And, of course, you still have the internet on top of that. So I imagine the term “leaky ship” doesn’t even begin to describe the “problem” as far as publishers are concerned.
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The game might change when dealing with publications that include(or ought to include) Very Large datasets(If memory serves you might be atypically familiar with one class of this case); but my understanding of bittorrent(and conceptually related mechanisms) is that it isn’t all that efficient compared to boring conventional CDNs if those are an option(most notably, devices close to the edge of the internet with asymmetric internet connections tend to be preposteriously inefficient servers: vastly overpowered for server-ing but hobbled by their connections).
Bittorrent or similar is an invaluable mechanism in that it allows someone with basically zero resources to get something out there when the alternative is not being able to; and it effectively allows people to pay to assist in distribution ‘in kind’ by seeding without the learning curve associated with setting up a full mirror; so even if inefficient it’s very handy for situations where the distribution is being handled by people with some access to ‘spare’ computing resources but basically no cash; but if you tot up the cost of those ‘spare’ resources vs. just paying the processionals to serve HTTP(S) it’s a much less exciting deal for anyone(like an institutional library) that would have the option to spend money on the problem; but not necessarily the ability to take advantage of ‘spare’ capacity without someone objecting.
You certainly wouldn’t want a single Master Repository; but that’s still within the realm of “We put together a ‘how to host a mirror’ document for everyone in the consortium and any interested 3rd parties” rather than dealing with a significant departure from the usual protocols.
Of course, all that is contingent on the legal matters getting sorted out. The ‘zero cost of entry’/‘limited anonymity’ aspect of torrents makes them very popular for situations where you are evading the copy cops; where ‘just pay AWS to do it’ would be a terrible plan.
I’d imagine that institutions with a lot to lose if hit for a zillion counts of willful infringement are loath to touch even the slightly arms-length methods for distributing stuff that would get them in trouble; and for stuff that won’t get you in trouble the unconventional means are of less use.
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