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lukeprog comments on Knowledge is Worth Paying For - Less Wrong
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Use fungibility. You want access to research, and you want knowledge to be more free.
So pay $50 for a book that will save you two dozen hours of research, and then spend a dozen of those hours writing blog posts and tweets telling other people exactly which easy steps they can take to promote open journals and so on. That accomplishes your goals a lot better than not paying for the book.
Or buy the journal article and upload it... you'd think there'd be better centralized pirated repositories of science by now.
My site is slowly becoming one. :)
The set of people who want journal access is very small compared to the set of people who want free movies, music or tv shows. Moreover, most of the people who will benefit from journal access are people who have university access. (Although there is an issue there that this is much more difficult for small schools.) So there's not that much market for it.
You could say the same thing about textbooks, thereby proving that avaxhome.ws doesn't exist.
There are a lot more undergrads that want basic textbooks than there are people who want to read research papers.
Undergrads typically need the physical textbook, not just an electronic one, for example to use in an open book test. (Though I was mainly trying to smuggle in a mention of a pirate site that does cater to autodidacts ...)
I have a Bachelor's degree and I've never either had an open-book test in college, nor heard of anyone having one. (Though we did have a couple of "you may bring one A4 worth of your own notes" tests.)
It depends on where you are, among other things. In Italy, about 90% of the tests I've taken in university were open-book, but I spent one year as an exchange student in Ireland and none of the tests I took there were open-book.
While I've never finished a Bachelor's, I did spend about two years at a university and open-book exams weren't unheard of at all.
Nearly every upper division physics final at UCI.
Sorry, nearly every one of them fell into which category? I can parse your sentence as being open to textbooks, being not at all open or allowing you to bring your small bit of notes.
Did any of them restrict the edition of the textbook?
Instructors on my university had no problem with people bringing copied books to open-book exams.
In most tests in my university, people are allowed to bring pretty much everything they want except other people and devices to communicate with the outside world.
Many classes don't have open book tests. This is especially true outside the sciences. The market is still much much larger than that for research papers.
There is arXiv, but it's mainly physics.
I doubt ArXiv considers the hosting of pirated content part of their mission or that they'd continue to host an article after receiving a valid DMCA takedown notice. In other words, I believe ArXiv depends on authors' restraining themselves from signing away their right to publish on ArXiv: physicists mostly engage in such restraint, but, e.g., chemists and medical researchers mostly do not.
ADDED. And over the course of ArXiv's existence, a significant fraction of authors have signed away the rights to the final post-peer-review version of their paper, which is why ArXiv has often been referred to as a preprint server.
Or, if you don't happen to predict that evangelism is the optimal strategy in the context then you can use the dozen hours writing up blog posts or papers that directly convey knowledge freely.