"Library of Alexandra"

Sci-Hub has been making waves. Such huge waves that the AAAS flagship, Science has taken note, with not just one, but three pieces devoted to the website, and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan. This profile of Elbakyan is quite balanced; it might be because a lot of downloads are by researchers in the rich countries. The third article is an editorial by Marcia McNutt: My love-hate of Sci-Hub.

Here's a WaPo summary, triggered by the revelations in Science. Here's a cool analysis of the Sci-Hub data dump [Edit: here's one more.]

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The title is from this comment in the Reddit thread on Sci-Hub from a couple of months ago.

Adventures in 'open' publishing

Mark Pilgrim's book, Dive Into Python, is available as a real book as well as a downloadable (free!) e-book. Interestingly, "the book is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which explicitly gives anyone and everyone the right to publish it themselves." And sure enough, someone did, and started selling it it on Amazon.com!

If you still don't see the point behind the whole thing -- the GNU Free Documentation License -- you really have to read this post:

So I am grateful for this anonymous soul who woke up one day and said to herself, “You know what I should do today? I should try to sell copies of that Free book that Pilgrim wrote.” Grateful, because it afforded me the opportunity to remind myself why I chose a Free license in the first place. My Zen teacher once told me that, when people try to do you harm, you should thank them for giving you the opportunity to forgive them. In this case it’s even simpler, because there’s nothing to forgive, just explain. She’s redistributing the work that I explicitly made redistributable. She’s kind of the point.

Now go read Cory Doctorow's post on his latest experiment in making his books available for free download.

Links ...

1. Nina Paley: Free as in Phreedom.

2. Sir John Maddox: the man who transformed Nature, "a parochial and withering publication, ... into a globally influential scientific giant."

3. Inside HigherEd: Obama jokes about honorary degree controversy.

4. Dan Ariely's short profile of Nicholas Christakis: "... [H]appiness, like the flu, can spread from person to person. When people who are close to us, both in terms of social ties (friends or relatives) and physical proximity, become happier, we do too."

Academic Earth

Check out Academic Earth which has "thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars" at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale. Most of the videos come with a rating as well!

Fantastic resource. Bookmark it.