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The concept of Tinderization as a social, political and economic template that forces humans to act more and more robotic: “Within Tinder, we sort each other into ones and zeroes, flattening away any human complexity, becoming efficient robots.” (Eler and Peyser)

http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2016/09/22/the-promise-of-total-tinderization/

#tinder #mediastudies #newmedia #theory

Will Sci-Hub change the research publishing industry?

After the music industry in the late '90s and subsequently the film industry, the research publishing industry is about to change.

The website Sci-Hub hosts a massive (illegal) collection of freely accessible scientific research papers. As history shows, whole industries reconfigure themselves once media becomes freely accessible to masses. Napster, Pirate Bay and (peer-to-peer) torrent networks forced publishers to come up with (or agree to) new sales models like the Apple iTunes Store and Spotify. For movies and TV-shows something similar happend with the rapid growth of Video On Demand and Netflix; after torrents, illegal online streaming and services like Popcorn Time made video freely accessible.

Alexandra Elbakyan started the website Sci-Hub in 2011 after she had a hard time accessing the research papers she needed for her neuroscience research. As a student of Kazakhstan university she had no access to the papers though her institution. A typical research paper costs about $30. Normally you skim and read tens to hundreds of them during research. So Elbakyan turned to illegal pirating instead.

Elbakyan is not alone, especially in the developing world there is a need for access to scientific research papers. Therefore her goal with Sci-Hub is to collect all research papers ever published, and make them free. Currently Sci-Hub hosts close to 50 million academic papers, Elbakyan claims that this is nearly all the paywalled scientific knowledge that exists in the world. Currently only 4.3 percent of Sci-Hub's monthly download requests are for articles not already in the database (Bohannon).

Science journal published an brilliant article about the worldwide usage of Sci-Hub based on a dataset supplied by Alexandra Elbakyan consisting of 28 million downloads from the Sci-Hub server between September 2015 and Februari 2016.

Image from Vox: see source

As you can see Sci-Hub is used all around the globe. Noteworthy over 2.6 million downloads are originating from Iran, 1.9 million from India, and 2.3 million from China. However Sci-Hub users are not limited to the developing world. The data suggests that some of the most intense use of Sci-Hub appears to be happening on the campuses of U.S. and European universities. This would imply that students can access the same papers through their university libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead, for convenience rather than necessity. The following reddit comment exemplifies this.

[–]AdrianBlake 334 punten 2 maanden geleden "Oh this paper looks cool" Click PDF "Urgh, sign in? Fine.... where is my institution..... come ooooon.... oh what this is the wrong list, I'm in the other one? Fuck sake..... OK cool. Now I'm logging in annnnnnnd..... Wait.... why am I at the homepage of the publisher company? Where is the paper I clicked? Fuck!!!" Clicks back a bunch of times "TIMED OUT? WHERE IS THE PAPER!!?!!?!"

While Elbakyan is an hero for many students and researchers who can't afford academic journals she is denounced as a criminal by academic publishers. In October last year leading publisher Elsevier sued Alexandra Elbakyan, claiming she violates US copyright laws and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. A judge seized the domein sci-hub.org, but this had little effect as the download frequency reveals. Although the web domein was shut, the servers that power Sci-Hub are based in Russia, beyond the influence of the U.S. legal system. Therefore like many piracy websites it seems impossible to totally diminish these websites. Elbakyan personally faces extradited to the United States while traveling under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

I also want to point to the somewhat similar case of internet activist Aaron Swartz. Who at the end of 2010 downloaded 450.000 academic journal articles directly from the MIT's computer network but he never shared them publicly. As a US citizen operating on US soil he was quickly convicted, facing devastating financial penalties and jail time, eventually Swartz hanged himself. If you have never heard of Aaron Swartz, I suggest to watch the documentary: "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz"

Image from Science: see source

As you can see above the publisher Elsevier is hit the hardest with 9.3 million illegal downloads in the six months leading up to March. As paid download totals are typically not made public, it is hard to discern how Sci-hub affects the mayor publishers. However the Science article refers to an report made public in 2010 by Elsevier. This report estimates all paid academic article downloads at more than 1 billion downloads a year for all publishers combined. With a estimated total of 56 million illegal downloads on Sci-Hub this would suggest that it pilfers off about 5% of yearly paid downloads. But if you ask me, it is not about the numbers, it is about the disruptiveness of Sci-Hub as a systems. Especially if you look at the impact that file sharing had on the music and film industry.

I could go on about the exuberant prices universities have to pay to access academic research despite the fact they are the institutions funding the research that gets published in the journals. But more important is the reason why SCI-Hub is so popular. We clearly need to move forward to an lawful open-access model that just works. Something like what Netflix and Spotify represent in their respective industries.

I will be watching the future of open-access research unfold, and in the meantime enjoy your free access on http://sci-hub.bz/ 👻

#open-access #data

Creative toilet sign

Email Hunter is your sales secret weapon.

Today I would like to share the useful tool Email Hunter I recently found. This website provides a list of all know email addresses of any website/ organisation. It works really well if you are looking for the email address of a specific person who you like to contact within a given organisation.

As a volunteer at a temporarily refugee camp in Amsterdam, of which the coordination is recently taken over by the COA (Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers) I tried Email Hunter on www.coa.nl. To my surprise this gave me 88 results. Many of which from external sources like Linkedin.com, volunteer organisations or local newspapers.

#Internet Tool

Emoji usage across country

The people behind the mobile keyboard app SwiftKey analysed over a billion emoji keystrokes worldwide. This gave them interesting insights in emoji usage across countries.

Australia

According to the research Australia’s emoji use characterises it as the land of vice & indulgence, using double the average amount of alcohol-themed emoji, 65% more drug emoji than average and leading for both junk food and holiday emoji.

🍆 Raunchy

The report shows that Canadians are twice as raunchy as all other languages, according to emoji. They use two times as many raunchy humor emoji such as:

🍌 🍆 🌽

🍑 🍒

♋️

✊ 👌👈 (well you get the point 😏 )

The united states are raunchier then average, Subsequently they are the top user of 🍆 .

👻 Ghost emoji

I was surprised to see that the ghost emoji isn’t mentioned in the report. It seems like only people from Oklahoma and me significantly use 👻 .

See the full report

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