The Robin Hood of Science
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
The effect of this is that you can no longer freely follow the rabbit hole of an interesting chain of references, nor will you read articles outside your bailiwick for fun because they popped up on a blog somewhere. Even if you carefully restrict the journals you're interested in reading, subscriptions will total several thousand per year. Single articles will be priced at $40-50, which is just nuts when you're reading for curiosity. Even if it pertains to your job, it's a chore to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to make your company pay for it. The end result is that, once you leave university, you're cut off from legally obtaining access to a lot of interesting stuff. How does restricting knowledge in this manner serve science or industry?
In physics, arxiv is pretty freakin' awesome... for recent stuff. If you're following a reference chain, you go off the reservation pretty darned quick. I admit, I've been guilty of using some slightly more labor intensive means of obtaining articles without paying for them, but it's a pain. I honestly hope somebody succeeds in making all of history's scientific publications freely and easily available online in a very permanent way. Hell, that research was practically all funded with public money anyways! Why should private companies like Elsevier be collecting money for research Schrödinger conducted on the public dime before anyone alive was born?
Sci-Hub is new to me, but it looks promising. This is something the world needs.
At the UCSF libraries here in San Francisco you can walk in off the street and browse the stacks and use the photocopiers without showing any ID. You can also use a workstation for one 2h session/day for free to access online journals and databases. You can also pay $100/yr for borrowing privileges (up to 5 items at a time).
https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/computing/policies_pub...
I'm not a researcher though, so my pursuit of papers are mostly purely interest-driven and can be given up easily. If you need to survey large number of papers I'd imagine the fee quickly accumulates.
In other fields, it can be even harder to find a good open access solution. In chemistry for example, I can't think of one. You can pay to have ACS or other publishers make something open access, but that's more money out a researcher's pocket that's not going toward better science.
Sure, publishing has costs, but nowhere near what gets charged. Also, much of the labor of reviewing papers is also provided to publishers free of charge, scientists review each other's work for no fee before acceptance in a journal that will charge dearly for it.
We as tax payers pay for this work, the people we pay to do it are caught in a catch-22 situation where they can either hand over their work to someone who will charge an arm and a leg, or be pushed out of science.
You mention chemistry. I don't know anything about chemistry journals, but given the precedent set by other fields, I feel that chemists don't have a good excuse for locking their research up behind paywalls.
Scientists and the institutions that support them must work towards solving these problems. Nobody is going to do that for them. A good first step would be to start acknowledging that the practice of science is as political as any other important human endeavour, and not some impartial objective selfless oracle. Step two could be finding solutions based on this new admission.
Also they quote "Robin Hood" thus:
"Elsevier, in contrast, operates by racket: If you do not send money, you will not read any papers."
Ummm, that's how most businesses work. If you want a sandwich, you have to pay for it first... Not all businesses are rackets.
"Robin Hood" continues...
"On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why can Elsevier not work like this, I wonder?"
Ummm, because they're a for-profit company, and their officers have a obligation to try to maximize profit for their share-holders?
Again, I don't want to defend Elsevier, but I think a better article would have acknowledged that there's more than one side to this issue.
This is a little naive. Running a good journal takes a lot of time and effort (not to mention a little bit of money).
In practice, paper selection is done in a bottom-up fashion already. An individual lab usually decides whether a paper is worth publishing. A minor conference decides which of the papers submitted to it are worth featuring. Bigger conferences look at the results of the minor ones. And so on. There is not a guy at Elsevier whose job it is to read the entire internet. Like the rest of their business, it's parasitic off the publicly funded university research system.
If you really think that no-one employed by journals is actually doing any work, I'm not sure what to say. The reality is that editing and publishing are time consuming, and that if this work is not being doing by paid employees of journals, it's going to have to be done by someone else.
Paper selection is not really the issue. That is largely done by (unpaid) reviewers in any case. It's everything else that goes into running a journal that's potentially going to give rise to problems.
Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible for a group of academics to get together and run a journal entirely by themselves. I think it's less clear whether this model can scale to replacing all current traditional journals. It's very easy to confuse work that's easy with work that's quick. Yes, it's easy to set up a website with a few PDFs on it, and it's easy to forward papers to reviewers, and it's easy to come up with a LaTeX stylesheet for papers, etc. etc. But maintaining all of that stuff and keeping it running smoothly eats up a lot of time, even though there's nothing fundamentally difficult about it.
Yes, it's less clear because we don't have that kind of system yet to see. We need to try it. Perhaps we'll find we do not need all current traditional journals. Perhaps we'll be fine with online archive for all academic publications and a good search engine.
A more accurate analogy might be:
You are a small sandwich manufacturer. Supermarkets are the only shops in town. The supermarket won't pay you, the sandwich manufacturer, to stock your goods. In fact, they may charge you for the privilege. Or they may charge their hungry customers. Or both.
And I love it.
0. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-outpu...
My understanding is that Sci-Hub works through "donated" access -- either credentials or inside-the-firewall systems -- through which it can request papers. There are other options for feeding papers into the system as well, and once they're inside, they're then available. Given that most disciplines tend to have a few highly-cited papers, and a standard Zipf / Power curve, starting with the most relevant papers and working down will get you a lot of coverage.
You've still got to keep up with new publications, but that's tractable.
Elsevier would have to deny access to entire academic institutions, or highly-placed researchers. Given they're already in a hot seat, that's a risky proposition.
sci-hub.io
searching for scihub returned results for other organisations.
Anyone use it much? How complete is it? I just tried it and got the nature paper about deepmind's go playing program, which was nice.