Some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub | Hacker News Reader

Some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub

blogs.library.duke.edu

110 pointschei0aiV38 comments

I was recently playing the 1995 space exploration game Ascendancy. One of the structures that you can build on a planet is an internet. The effect of building this on a planet was to double a planet's total research output. That's how the internet was viewed in 1995 by starry-eyed game developers.

I wish we returned to that 1995-era optimism of what the internet was about. An internet should have made traditional journals obsolete. It shouldn't be taking this long.

  > An internet should have made traditional journals
  > obsolete. It shouldn't be taking this long.

The futurists failed to see the negative value points of advertising, and how it drags everything down into a pit where "you won't believe what happens next."

For every starry-eyed and future creating technologist, who really does see the best-case scenario for what current and near-future technologies can accomplish, they need to always be shadowed by a team of altruistic business/PR/advertising-savvy advocates who can remind them how the worst among us are going to screw it all up so that our hero-geniuses can bake safeguards into the systems they create from the onset.

I remember that game... I think I still have the original box in a closet! The art was amazing. The music incredible. The 3D systems were very cool for the time. I sank dozens of hours into it and then realized the AI was utterly and hopelessly broken. I had pissed off an alien civilization and had absolutely no defense up in a system they were adjacent to. They sent a massive armada to that system, but then that armada just sat on an uninhabited planet doing nothing. This armada was so massive that it could have steamrolled every one of my planets, but it just sat there getting bigger as more ships joined it. Eventually, I gave up on building an armada big enough to dislodge it, ignored it, and wiped the aliens out with my own ships. I never did get a hold of the patch that was supposed to fix the AI. How does it play (I assume you are playing with the patch)?

Awesome, TIL: the U.S. ignored international copyrights in the 19th century. I don't think most Americans know that either.

Indeed. And this quote is priceless:

> As one Senator said in voting against the [1888] bill [to recognize foreign copyrights]: “An international copyright is simply a monopoly … what is known as protection, or taxing the people to make a few persons rich … It seems to me that there can be no excuse for carrying this restriction upon human knowledge.”

It was a gradual process. Also, for context, it wasn't until the mid-late 1800s that private corporations were legitimized in the US. Corporate charters needed to specify what public interest they'd serve. Canal and railroad corporations were the first. And it wasn't that long before railroad corporations has bought the government. So it goes.

Ecomist Ha-Joon Chang (Cambridge University) makes this point quite eloquently in several of his books, notably Bad Samatarians, which rather convincingly guts free-trade rhetoric.

It is a curious coincidence how the effective final day of public domain in the US demarcates the public domain Sherlock Holmes (England) from the perpetually-copyrighted Mickey Mouse (US).

I find it kind of offensive how Disney has been putting Steamboat Willie on its opening credits, recently seen in Zootopia, flaunting its perpetual copyright in our faces.

In fairness, Disney would be able to do this whether the character remained sequestered or not; nobody else can, though- what a shame.

The fact is that if you're not making money off these characters, you can do whatever the hell you want. If you are making money and you can keep it fairly anonymous, you can still do whatever you want.

you mean in obscurity, because whether or not a yt acc is anonymous, disney can have it censored.

Unsurprisingly, countries that produce more content than they import have tended to adopt strong copyright laws, whereas net importers of works have typically espoused views like those of the senator qouted in the sibling comment.

This sounds like a good application of the [Citation Needed] tag. At least it calls for some examples, rather than a sweeping generalization.

Nations act in their self interest. Why would one need a citation to confirm that?

Because we are trying to have a rational discussion. And it's possible that "Nations act in their self interest" is often wrong, or is not well defined.

For example, if a Guatemalan dictator commits genocide against its own people and is benevolent to the United Fruit Company ... is that "Nation acting in its self interest"? It's not a clear cut question. Equally it's not clear that the behavior of corporations, dictators or governments regarding copyright at different times in history is simple "self interest".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'%C3%A9t...

Not just copyrights, the US ignored patents too. And that played a significant role in the industrial revolution.

Even as late as the 1950s, Jim Baen could publish Tolkien in the US without permission because copyrights weren't properly registered.

I remember both Charles Dickens and Gilbert & Sullivan having quite the problem with this in the States. The opera Pirates of Penzance was first performed in New York rather than London in an attempt to establish copyright in the U.S., but according to Wikipedia the attempt was unsuccessful.

I remember a section in my high school text book noting that we literally stole some textile machinery from the British.

Another reason to laugh at the judical system.

I know this has been talked to death, but there's an aspect I haven't seen addressed.

This piece says "and in disregard of the rules imposed on distribution by the copyright holders." Others say something similar.

How many of those articles in SciHub are not covered by copyright? For example, if the author is a US government employee, then there is no copyright. I've seen many articles with a footnote that says it isn't covered by copyright because of that, though I can't tell if it's even 1%.

There are also articles which are just the schedule for an upcoming meeting. (This is especially true in the older literature.) These aren't covered under copyright because there is no creative input.

I don't think it's enough to be really significant, but it does make me wonder what the reaction would be to a no-copyright-applies version of Sci-Hub.

It would still be in "disregard of the rules imposed on distribution by the" distributor, but at least it would help tease out which complaints are due to copyright infringement and which are due to breaking a distribution agreement.

> For example, if the author is a US government employee, then there is no copyright.

Mind-twistingly, it's not covered by copyright _in the U.S._, but probably is in other countries.

If that were the case, then the publishing companies are violating copyright law as there is no copyright transfer agreement from the author or employer.

I don't really know what you mean.

But here's the wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...

Which says:

"This act only applies to U.S. domestic copyright as that is the extent of U.S. federal law. The U.S. government asserts that it can still hold the copyright to those works in other countries."

With a couple cites. You can google more about it too. It is the U.S. government's position that they do hold copyright to such works in other countries, and I believe they have generally succesfully enforced their copyright in other country's courts. (I don't know if they have ever failed in other country's courts, on the grounds that U.S. law says the U.S. goverment can't hold copyright? I'm not sure what bearing such a U.S. law would have in another country's courts, which is the whole idea).

It's crazy how expensive science journals are. Philosophy journals are much more reasonable, typically 35-50 dollars a year for an individual subscription. That gives you some idea of what it actually costs to produce a journal.

Unrelated point: with 50 million articles, I wonder if Sci-Hub is looking into ipfs. That would solve the danger of getting knocked off-line by legal action.

Philosophers still don't understand that value of of information is not the total sum for the articles available but the relevant one?

Funnily enough the keywords are making search way more efficient than google learning algorithms.

Anyone could now write a good search engine for this problem now that I think of it with some xhi². With a good tokenizer we could even use scholarship keywords to tag the rest of the internet.

aren't philosophers required to read until their eyes pop out? would put the price in perspective.

Scientific publishing is different from other things.

If it is an ordinary book or a movie or something, the creator(s) of the creative work gets paid for it through royalties.

Scientists, for the most part, receive public money to do research, and then Elsevier expects to get paid again for what we already paid for. It seems to me that if my taxes go to support research I should be able to read it, and if it is the developing or developed world it doesn't matter.

If we, as the human race, want to avoid upcoming desasters, not that i am summoning them, neither predicting those, we have an obligation to make research and its gains available to all mankind.

Financial burdens are a stone in our all way, be it in the taxpayer who funds R&D, or be it the institutions that want to profit from it.

There cannot be a "middle ground", we all have to stand back for the greater benefits of free flowing knowledge.

That is a principle of the "web" itself, profit from open data, but also keep personal data protected. Easy as that.

There will be no win in restricting access to scientific research in the end, but to keep corporate interest and greed alive. I fear that future.

Edit: Institutions.

Agreed. The next step to opening up research is to make it easier. That's what we are about publicly to launch over at http://www.myire.com in the coming months. We are battle testing it with phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials in enterprise before the launch. After the launch it'll be far easier for any researcher to do their job and to publish their work.

If you work in research and want a peak into the future email lane (at) myire dot com and I'd be happy to demo.

People keep on saying that academic journals provide no value, since all of the work is being done by the scientists anyway. I have another take on this. I think that they're providing a (virtual) meeting place for scientists. Just like banks, whose job is to provide a meeting place for people who want to stash away their money in a deposit and other people who need to buy a new house. From this point of view, the sooner journals stop extorting readers for reading the articles, the better. The readers are innocent bystanders in this game, and in any case free distribution of research is in the best interest of the players (the scientists).

Your metaphor is a bit confusing. Do you mean that both services depend on the network effect to provide value? The more scientists contribute and take from a piece of work, the better it becomes, and the more people deposit and borrow from one bank the more it can provide for new customers. The comparison might be a stretch but I can see where you were going with it.

If I saved some money, I'd rather stash it in a trustworthy institution like Bank of America (bear with me for a moment) than search for someone to lend it to on my own. Similarly, if I wrote a research article, I will submit my article to Nature or Science, who will find an esteemed scientist to referee my paper and give it their stamp of approval. I could try to find such a scientist directly and ask them to write an endorsement letter for my research, but Nature or Science are much more likely to be successful at this due to their stellar reputation.

When you are at the cutting edge of your field (able to publish in Nature or Science), you know exactly who the peer reviewers are (there is usually only 5 to 10 teams in the world who are experts in your area). So you know it's one of 20 to 60 people (roughly).

That part is actually very easy. The job the journal does is to randomly and anonymously assign the reviewer (sometimes not entirely randomly, giving it to your critics). But all that could be automated (taking into account top publishers in the field, newcomers to the field, conference publications, etc).

Yes, that is true. But the filtration mechanism you are describing happens through the work of editors and peer reviewers who also get close to nothing. The value is extracted by content aggregators who don't contribute anything except aggregation, which is already provided by search engines etc...

It still leaves the discussion of “what motivates people in a non-profit economy?”. In the science community - probably more than anywhere else - this is peer recognition (which can eventually be turned into money in the form of higher research budgets / government grants / salaries).

As it’s perfectly established to compete for peer recognition online (Hackernews frontpage, Facebook likes, Retweets...) I think Sci-Hub can do wonders here. Why not introduce “Paper of the day”, “Most read article in Neuroscience this month”, “most discussed research”?

Your apparent inability to understand how someone could be motivated by anything other than profit and fame I find more than a little disturbing.

Why are these discussions always so short sighted?

People seem to continually tunnel in on tiny aspects of the world.

It doesn't matter whether my car has a carburettor or not. What matters is that the wheels turn and I get where I need to go.

What matters, is that people who produce research, useful research, are permitted to eat, to raise families, to learn, to live a generally reasonable life.

How we do that is the interesting question. Not these myopic arguments about IP and copyright.

I suggest to anyone interested in this subject to read the book "Piracy" by Adian Johns, http://www.adrianjohns.com/piracy/

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