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atjones111 t1_j8mv775 wrote

Reply to comment by Rear-gunner in New study examines Leonardo da Vinci's experiments on gravity by Rear-gunner

Paywall scientific and historical records etc should be a crime against humanity

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DastardlyDM t1_j8n2pqh wrote

I understand your intent but Preserving, Translating, digitizing, and then publishing that digital content onto a web server all takes work and people generally like to be paid for work.

So instead of making it illegal (which would just result in bad/low quality translations slowly trickled as passion projects or worse none because no one is paying for the work to be done) we should be getting the World's governments to fund them as social works of preservation for the good of society and publish them on free sources. And yes this means tax money would go to it.

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fabulousrice t1_j8n42ut wrote

Isn’t putting it on Gutenberg or Wikipedia a way to preserve, translate, digitize - for free?

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Colon t1_j8n6hpu wrote

or internet archive among others. you could consider the internet in general as what you described. but it'd be nice to have a global standard (in the spirit of the ISS for example), if there isn't one already..? idk

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DastardlyDM t1_j8n8z5o wrote

It's "free" in that those things are free for hosting but only up until the donations dry up. A funding line supported by law would ensure it. Also hosting it is the last step in costs. You still have the work retrieving and preserving the original, translating it (no small feat), then finally digitizing and formating that translation for readability. All that is labor people have to do.

It's a lot of work and awesome people do it out of the goodness of their heart and personal passion but we should, as a society, be funding and ensuring it for the future.

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fabulousrice t1_j8n9tai wrote

I think you used the wrong word at some point but I find a lot of this mindset to prevent people from accessing information - while the internet was invented to share information with as little boundaries as possible. If it wasn’t for all the costs you mentioned, medical research could make giant leaps and lots of medical conditions would find cures faster - but somehow information paywalling gets in the way for such idealism… DaVinci lived 500 years ago - if we translate his work now the translator, although they deserve retribution (could it be crowd sourced? Helped by AI ?…) could also register it in his name and sell it instead of putting it back in the public domain. Maybe selling physical copies of things was a better answer than the impossible “everything should be free” internet dream. I’m all for physical copies personally.

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DastardlyDM t1_j8nib70 wrote

It depends. Is the item in question being translated for fun or for academic, scientific, or historical value? If it's for more than just fun then it can't be "crowd source" or helped with AI (though that one may shift as time goes on) because it needs pedigree, credibility, and someone to claim it is accurate to the source. You set 100 people loose on translating old language and you will get 150 different interpretations. We need consensus to preserve, and that takes organization, and that takes manpower, oversight, and regulation.

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fabulousrice t1_j8oplks wrote

My suggestion to crowd source was regarding the financing of the translation and hosting.

That could be a type of Kickstarter project that would say “we are $… away from being able to make this document fully translated and accessible for free and on the public domain for the next hundred years”.

I know it sounds counterintuitive to say that in order for something to be free to access on the Internet people have to pay, but those things would get financed very quickly and benefit a great number of people for many years.

Again, that is how Wikipedia works… and centralizing information on a famous website like Wikipedia would be a much better solution than everybody who owns important documents creating their own type of website and their own type of subscription plan and their own type of paywall…

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DastardlyDM t1_j8or2yx wrote

Except my recommendation was not everyone own their own website. It was governments creating and preserving things as a social works. Why do you want the responsibility to fall on individuals instead of the bodies that represent everyone?

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fabulousrice t1_j8osq6f wrote

I agree with your idea but not all government have:

-desires or duty to allow their people to access information (education and science funding is usually a left wing value);

-budgets or dedicated political bodies for research, science, education that can afford it;

-a long lasting policy of open and accessible information, even accessible to foreign internet users (bandwidth costs money and why use tax money from your country to allow people abroad who don’t pay taxes to use the information?)

-consistent political views on the same topics, depending on the succession of different rulers (a new ruler in place could decide to shut down servers dedicated to science if that doesn’t fit their politics);

Etc. Ideally, it would be possible. But the fickle nature of digital information makes me wonder if publishing important papers on physical supports (no-DRM, I mean paper…) is still the most reliable and persistent way of preserving and sharing it.

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DastardlyDM t1_j8oxima wrote

Why do you believe a centralized, privately run, non-profit is any less at risk of the same short comings you just listed? At least with a government program it would take an act of law to drop instead of just a private entity pulling the plugs

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fabulousrice t1_j8oxyef wrote

Because there is more consistency in how Wikipedia has operated since it started existing than in most governments across different parties and mandates?

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DastardlyDM t1_j8ozmml wrote

As they threaten to shutter their doors or sell out every year?

Also shows you know nothing about the library of Congress or other such government groups.

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Blakut t1_j8yyc0f wrote

yeah, no, giving the average joe access to medical research journals won't mean faster cures. How would that work?

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fabulousrice t1_j8yyxpz wrote

Some “average joe” can try different things to help their medical condition and get results and no one would hear about it. Condition X is treated with medication Y in country Z but 90% of people get nasty side effects but hey it’s good for business. In county W, people treat it with medication V which has less side effects and is cheaper or even free. How would people in country Z hear about it?

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Blakut t1_j90rtj7 wrote

That's why you publish the results. Average joe can access them too if he pays whatever 15 bucks to the journal or via scihub for free, but he can't understand what's inthe paper and has no equipment so he can't do anything. Most journals are free access now yet no average joe reads them anyway.

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fabulousrice t1_j9234ui wrote

Your comment is exactly what I’m trying to point out. If data collection was easy and free, a lot of times science would prove itself wrong. Long term effects of medication for example, is massively under studied (even short term to be honest), so pharmaceutical companies just write insane list of possible side effects even if they don’t apply to you. One example of many

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wait-a-minut t1_j8ohlup wrote

This is where fediverse apps come in and could play a key role in how distributed information on the web works in the future. Look into a few of these. There are communities for scientific research specifically as well

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DastardlyDM t1_j8onf41 wrote

Again, if it's not law and backed by the world's governments it could vanish from support at any moment. But I agree those such efforts are worth while in the current here and now of our reality.

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Coomb t1_j8o2kp7 wrote

As far as I know, those websites don't offer a service where you just give them a manuscript and they do the work of digitizing it and/or translating it. And if they did, I doubt anybody would use it for important texts like this codex. Digitization and translation are significant expenses.

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fabulousrice t1_j8o3sc7 wrote

That’s literally what they do. The most important public domain texts in History are hosted there for anyone to access them freely (which is what the Internet should be…)

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Coomb t1_j8ofl5h wrote

Hosting digital versions of things isn't the same as digitizing and/or translating them.

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fabulousrice t1_j8opxcn wrote

But that’s how it starts. Once something is hosted, people have access to it and can work on translating it collaboratively. If 100% of all medical research was posted online and easily accessible, language barrier would not be as much of an issue as you think

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Gonergonegone t1_j8ozbb5 wrote

They aren't talking about the language barrier. They're saying the people that originally translate and digitize it (which takes a lot of time and effort), they deserve to be paid.

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CoderDispose t1_j8prgu9 wrote

I wonder if future generations of chat AI bots will help with this.

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poonmaster64 t1_j9j9fnv wrote

This is kind of a terrifying idea in my opinion, current ai will create fake sources for information and convince itself that they’re legitimate, even with a lot of advances I don’t think I’ll ever want to trust ai to digitize, translate or compile information

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eeeking t1_j8oxrra wrote

They're not "free". Wikipedia is funded by donations.

Many historians would willingly make their work available "for free" in exchange for donations.

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fabulousrice t1_j8oy0vt wrote

Isn’t that what grants are?

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eeeking t1_j8p5062 wrote

Yes, and most grant-funded work is available to read for free (if you know where to look).

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TorsoPanties t1_j8p9el3 wrote

Someone is paying for those services. Nothing is free, they could go tomorrow

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justinmyersm t1_j8ne1sd wrote

If it's a University that's doing the study, that is funded with tax payer dollars.

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cruista t1_j8ote2s wrote

Tax money went into the research. Now a commercial publisher wants your money as well.

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Archmagnance1 t1_j8pio2m wrote

Damn if only those 10s of thousands of dollars MIT got per year per student went towards digitizing records so they wouldn't be behind a paywall.

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DastardlyDM t1_j8pjq3a wrote

Sure itd be nice but why would we wait to have private businesses do it when they never will? We can live in reality or your fantasy world where businesses in a capitalist market do things not for profit.

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Archmagnance1 t1_j8ps046 wrote

MIT is a non profit entity.

I'm very aware of what reality is, that doesn't mean we should excuse the stupid or harmful things that go on in reality.

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DastardlyDM t1_j8pukb9 wrote

Great, proving private non-profits that aren't to be trusted and it should be a regulated government entity.

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Archmagnance1 t1_j8qauxa wrote

Until 2026 that wouldn't change a thing.

You're awfully hostile for no apparent reason.

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atjones111 t1_j8o21v9 wrote

Ok pay the employees you don’t need to paywall things. Your just falling for the bait of why these things need to monetized

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DastardlyDM t1_j8o9izf wrote

How do employers paying the employees get money with which to pay them in your model?

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