alchemy in Elbakyan 2016
- that is, trade
was just as much considered theft as what we call piracy today.
Why did it turn out this way? Because Hermes was originally a god of
boundaries and transitions. Therefore, we can think that property is related
to keeping something within boundaries. At the same time, the things that
Hermes protected - theft, trade and communication - are related to boundary-
crossing.
If we think about scholarly journals, then any journal is first of all a means
of communication, and therefore it's apparent that keeping journals in closed
access contradicts the essence of what they were intended for.
This is, of course, not even the most interesting thing.
Hermes actually evolved - that is, while he was once an intellectual deity, he
later came to be interpreted as the same as Thoth, the Egyptian god of
knowledge, and further came to oversee such things as astrology, alchemy, and
magic - that is, the things from which, you might say, contemporary sciences
arose. So we can say that contemporary science arose from theft.
Of course, someone can object, saying that contemporary science is very
different from esoterica, such as astrology and alchemy, but if we look at the
history of science, we see that contemporary science differs from the ancient
arts in the former being more open.
That is, when the movement towards greater openness appeared, contemporary
science also appeared. Once again this is not an argument in support of
scholarly publishers.
Indeed, in the cultural consciousness science and the process of learning have
always been closely associated with theft, beginning with the legend of Adam
and Eve and the forbidden tree, which is called simply "the tree of
knowledge." And it's interesting that Elsevier's logo depicts some kind of
tree, which, accordingly, raises associations with this tree in the Garden of
Eden - the tree of knowledge - from which it was forbidden to eat the fruit.
Likewise we can recall the well-known legend of Prometheus, a part of our
cultural consciousness, who stole some knowledge an
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