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Comment by travjones | Hacker News Reader

I've used sci-hub a few times. It's a little buggy and not every article can be accessed, but it works well enough to try when I'm not on campus.

$30 to read a single article is ridiculous anyway and presents a barrier to scientists who don't have, can't afford, or don't want to pay for access. I hope sci-hub stays up and improves for some time.

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If you're a student, your university likely has a proxy service that allows you to access journals from anywhere using your credentials.

My previous uni gives access to alumni for life, so I can access journals for free from wherever.

And what are people outside of the U.S. supposed to do?

I don't think it is unique to the US... I'm in Canada and also have that.

I'm in Australia and we have the same service. But it is bullshit that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls.

I'm living in the United Arab Emirates. My previous college has subscriptions in most journals. My current institute also has access.

Agreed. I studied in Germany, and none of the academic institutions I know of make papers accessible to alumnis. For students, sure, but for alumnis? Never heard of it.

The local hack: get a lifetime membership at the uni computer club. This gets you a shell account on a computer inside the uni network, and Rob's your uncle. Lifetime cost is about $100 here, and that money goes to a good cause.

My uni didn't have any of that. YMMV

The GP is a great person to ask that question to in light of the fact that he is a student in UAE. I am curious why you assumed that GP is from the US?

Let me guess: Because the spoken language is English and the site has a clearly US-centric culture? Even more specifically, an SV culture. Have you ever seen a housing article about Fresno on the front page? New York? One could argue the bias lacked utility, but it's hardly incriminating.

From a Norwegian IP you can get access to many medical journals, see http://www.helsebiblioteket.no/om-oss/english. This can be achieved through TOR if you choose only to exit through a node in Norway.

Even with that, every uni does not subscribe to everything. You can still find important papers behind paywalls.

In my uni we had pages-long emails for the lab explaining the different procedures (at least 4, e.g. access with some other proxy, etc) to try to get access to an article before requesting it.

Not from anywhere. Most major publishers, sure, but some journals are a little esoteric or very specific in their discipline and not part of the main journal subscription collections.

I frequently took advantage of this when I was a student. It was amazing that I could bypass any paywall and get access to all the journals/articles that I needed either for my courses or my own curiosity.

Unfortunately, that great privilege was revoked when I stopped paying tuition (aka graduated).

> My previous uni gives access to alumni for life, so I can access journals for free from wherever.

Huh. Need to check on this, thanks. That said I hope sci-hub succeeds.

What about poor countries who can't afford to pay for many subscriptions in the field? Should their scientists be banned from making contributions to science?

Spain is not very poor, but when I was doing research in Seville, the department simply could not afford subscriptions to most physics journals, so we had to write directly to the authors with mixed success.

How do you think a scientist in Senegal would feel about spending $6,000 [0] for access to a single journal for 5 researchers.

If the per-capita GNI is $1,000 [1], the equivalent in the US would be for your university to pay $330,000 for 5 people in your department to read _a single_ journal!!

[0] http://store.elsevier.com/product.jsp?issn=03784371 [1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD/countries...

I agree completely. Open access is really the only way to go if we want scientific knowledge to be equally accessible everywhere.

However, if you were fortunate enough to attend a college that does have access, you should take advantage of it.

Probably a researcher in Senegal has access through this: http://www.research4life.org/about/

I specifically chose the journal above, because it's not included in that initiative.

Research4life only gives access to what the first world thinks the third world should concern itself with. Namely <<leading journals and books in the fields of health, agriculture, environment, and applied sciences>>. I think it's a generous initiative, but it misses the point of open access.

If you're poor and passionate about math, theoretical physics, or some branches of computer science ... then, sorry, these journals are only for the rich kids.

Instead of paying the publishers, who contribute nothing to the work at all (remember they also charge us researchers hundreds of dollars just to get our work published), I'd rather donate the same $30 to sci-hub.

Another option: pay $5 to actual editors and designers, and $15 to reviewers. And save $10. Remember, the publisher typically doesn't even help with paper formatting, never mind copyediting.

Unpaid reviewers (who allegedly agree to work for some 'reputation' — BS, they're anonymous) delegate the actual scientific review to the least busy student of those capable to write a syntactic semblance of a positive review.

And then you're forced to pay $30 to have a chance to finally review it for yourself, as you're the only one interested in quality.

Please pay the reviewers, or everybody (in many applied areas at least) will self-publish in blogs and judge quality on HN votes. Like it has happened with most of software research.

Where do you get good editing and design work for $5?

Most reviewers don't want $15 from the author. Quoting http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/peer-review-survey-20... :

> Reviewers divided over incentives: Just over half of reviewers think receiving a payment in kind (e.g. subscription) would make them more likely to review; 41% wanted payment for reviewing, but this drops to just 2.5% if the author had to cover the cost. Acknowledgement in the journal is the most popular option.

I suspect the parent meant $5 per sale; if you were selling millions of copies of papers, you'd have a substantial editing and design budget.

Ahh, that makes sense - I missed the context.

When does it end? I'm reading papers from the 1960s and '70s - where should I send the $5? Do I adjust for inflation? And how do I send Deutsche Marks to West Germany?

Most papers have some to all public funding behind them. Even papers from Stanford and MIT.

Shouldn't the public have free access? We paid for them.

The NIH now requires that NIH-funded research publications be made open-access upon acceptance. They're usually on pubmed central. These tend to be the ugly author manuscripts instead of the typeset format but at least they're available.

https://publicaccess.nih.gov/

No doubt $30 is expensive, but many journals do provide free access to their content in developing countries.

Kindly give a few examples. Tired of seeing $$ to read beyond the abstract.

http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/devecon.dtl

Not in Russia

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