Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Their behavior over the last two decades has been little more than reprehensible rent-seeking. Whatever goodwill they had disappeared as they sapped with increasing ruthlessness the dollars of students and non-profits. See, e.g., one of many such figures: http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_grap...
It is absurd and dishonest to call Sci-Hub "piracy", given that all of its contents were originally created and given away with the express goal of wide dissemination.
Anyone that has gone through research and academia knows that you often need to browse many papers to even find the ones worth reading. 25 paper cap includes browsing PDFs; you will easily hit that cap in a single day simply through browsing.
IEEE and IEEE Explore can go something themselves. This is coming from a published IEEE author and academic researcher.
Exactly. And without the monthly subscription plan (something I wasn't even aware of until this comment thread), the going rate seems to be around $30 per paper--rent-seeking to the point of highway robbery. One thing that these publishing companies could have done long ago was allow some sort of "free preview" of the full text or "full refund within 10 min" option to help deal with this problem. I have no idea how this would be done technically to prevent "pirating" but, as it is, the pay-per-paper system is completely disconnected from the way researchers browse papers.
If you create an account but do not subscribe, you can view all the papers but only for 5 minutes each. You can then subscribe to read the ones you need more of, or purchase access to 5 papers for $20.
The above is for online reading. If you need PDFs, you can purchase those but they are not cheap. They are usually what the publisher charges on the publisher's site less a 20% discount.
The paper quality declination plus publication quantity inflation are the main reasons in this "Sci-Hub" crisis.
One thing that always sticks in my craw is that the raw data is very rarely published for analysis. Many may disagree, but I think that by not publishing the raw data for experiments the temptation to commit academic fraud is very high.
I often wonder about some of the more recent scandals whether it might have been picked up a lot faster had the data been more readily available.
I also have noticed that many journals don't say who the reviewers are after publication. For instance, I was looking at body pyschotherapy the other day and came across something called biodynamic analysis, which appears to be a widely held and well respected view within the subdiscipline. I was amazed to discover that something called "grounding" was a serious concept that underpins this analysis, so I looked at the Wikipedia references and discovered that there was at least one journal citation to The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The article seems to be attempting to make a link between bloody viscosity and electrical grounding of humans to the earth! [1]
Now there is another article that shows there is virtually no impact on the body from the same journal, so I started to wonder how this passed peer review. The answer is - I have no way of knowing as they don't make it clear what their review policies and procedures are, and they appear to charge authors to publish work.
In other words - it's pseudoscience dressed up in credibility. And it is making a serious impact in the world of psychology!
Perhaps 1 out of 3 reviewers gets it, another is bored by the fiddly and detailed methods section, and the third was subconsciously hoping for a "brilliant", mystifying secret sauce. Oh, that's all you did? he asks. I could have done that.
Of course you could have done it, I just told you how and pointed you to the data. I also compiled that data, and you won't even let me tell you that because of blind review.
I'm an occultist. One of the first regimens I did so to learn occultism was grounding and centering. It's very much an esoteric skill, and not something to be cited in a paper... unless it was being discussed under a 'microscope'.
I would enjoy in using fMRI or other diagnostic tools to see what physiologically happens when I do those things. But I have no qualms; that shouldn't be in any academic paper until my recommendation of measuring it is done.
I used to live a couple blocks from a uni library, and I practically lived there. In the summers I drove straight there from work, got lost in the stacks learning about random things, and only left when it closed.
Fortunately that library was completely free to the public, but if it weren't I would have happily paid $100/mo during the summer months for access (Probably saved that much just in utilities anyways.)
Couldn't the researchers simply publish their own papers? Make torrents etc? Or are they prevented from doing that somehow?
Bibliographic metrics, like the number of publications and where they are published, are use as a proxy for the quality of someone's research. It can affect grant funding and career advancement.
Researchers can publish their own papers. But researchers also tend to want that work to be disseminated, both to spread knowledge and get recognition for the work. Journals help simplify that process. A field typically has one or two main journals, which most people in the field track. It's more likely that a publication will be noticed if it's published in one of those papers.
What's wrong with giving other researchers the ability to rate and comment on a paper.
It's a not a perfect filter but I would argue it works just as well a this journal reputation system and it prevents issues like people having to publish with them to get recognized not to mention it encourages discussion between academics which could lead to some breakthroughs as well.
You want peer recognition so why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications.
This system is a product of a bygone era and as all other systems like it it is resisting change by relying on copyright.
I see copyright as the root of most of our current societies issues it is just not compatible with how we work not to mention most of these papers were made with public funding so there shouldn’t be any copyright on it to begin with the copyright belongs to the public domain they payed for it.
A publication just publishing it on their website and slapping a price on it is pure theft and they should be treated like the pirates they are pursuing.
LOL! No. Ratings are nearly useless. By which I mean I don't know how I would incorporate ratings into my own research.
How do you keep a ratings system from being a proxy for popularity, rather than a measure of novelty or utility? How do you keep it from being easily gamed? Does a "5.2" for a 1995 paper have the same meaning as a "5.2" for a 2010 paper?
"You want peer recognition so why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications"
Do tell me how. Post on my blog and hope people come across it?
Journals outsource marketing. Get rid of journals and something must replace that service, or I have to become a marketer.
"This system is a product of a bygone era .. relying on copyright"
You are mistaken. The system does not rely on copyright. The scientific publication system dates from the 1600s, dated from Oldenburg's 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'. Copyright dates from the 1700s, dated from the Statute of Anne.
The scientific publication system depends on reliable selection and curation. Its current form is dominated by large publishing companies which use copyright law for revenue generation, but that's only been true for the last few decades. Scientific publication also existed in the USSR even without copyright protection. (article 103(2) according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un... gave "permission to reproduce published scientific, artistic, or literary works as excerpts (or even entirely) in scientific, critical, or educational publications").
"most of these papers were made with public funding so there shouldn’t be any copyright on it to begin with the copyright belongs to the public domain they payed for it."
I understand and sympathize with your argument. But in practice things aren't so clear cut. Rarely does the money come 100% from public sources. Is your argument that even 1 cent of public funding means the entire work product must be in the public domain?
Are you making the moral argument that copyright should to the funding source? Or is it limited only to public funding sources? For example, if 100% of the money for a project comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, then do you want the foundation to control the copyright the work product? What if it's 80% Gates and 20% public funded? Is it public domain then?
If 3 years of research was publicly funded, and resulted in paper, and 2 more years was privately funded by BigCorp., to analyze the data further, then must that additional two years also be in the public domain?
And on and on. Unless "1 cent => public domain always", then there's no clear line. Is that your argument?
(BTW, there is another clear line - work by a US government employee is in the public domain. A small percentage of the scientific papers are in the public domain because of that.)
I do think open commenting systems would be a boon to academic discourse though.
> What's wrong with giving other researchers the ability to rate and comment on a paper.
I do not see nothing inherently bad with this (provided very good moderation tools are in place). However...
* > I would argue it works just as well a this journal reputation system *
As a journal reputation system, possibly; although I find that experts have often very different taste compared to say general Hacker News public -- for instance, machine learning has a very high "coolness factor" these days compared to other areas of computer science, but it would be unwise to make a system where a weaker paper on machine learning gets vastly more credit than a better paper on say approximation algorithms.
However, an important part of the journal submission process is the fact that the editors ask the members of the academic community for spending several days on the paper, noting major and minor details and checking the validity of the proof.
Since the reviewers do their work for free, there is no reason why there cannot be an open system that replicates the same process; still, just "adding a comment system to arXiv" will probably not be enough, as people spend rarely that much time on comments (15 minutes tops, not entire days).
Researcher: "I have to go to this club so people think I'm fancy"
Club: "The club charges a lot so only fancy people go there"
Other people: "This person is very fancy because they go to that club"
End result is that people buy their "fanciness" by being on that club
Truly I have seen article reviews ruin a budding research scientist's career. Of course one could argue that other problems contribute to finding themselves in that position.
I strongly believe that review could be almost exclusively through positive feedback, with crowd-sourced minimal annotations in the margins, i.e. "the idea in this paragraph came from <earlier paper link>", and "this idea is novel; wish I thought of it", and "there is a strong analogy between this paragraph and <some other tangentially related idea>"
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...
So why exactly are publications locking these papers behind massively expensive paywalls when writing them and reviewing them are being done for free?
The reason researchers publish in these journals is it gives them street cred. There are several open access journals - but scanty participation since their impact factor is unknown and does little to promote the researchers career.
Speaking as someone who has published myself, the paywalls are highway robbery. But, imho - it is a problem only the researchers can solve by concertedly supporting open access journals and getting involved in them (maybe a yc research idea???). The established professors would need to take the lead on this - not the underlings.
Personally - I've seen the "light" and stayed back in industry as opposed to moving into academia as I had hoped. The rat race for funding & publications & street cred seemed a lot worse there.
This is the same phenomenon.
What excludes the academic from also publishing elsewhere?
Nature, for example, permits private redistribution of accepted papers - I could send you a copy if you asked me for one - but requires exclusive publishing rights - I couldn't just put it on my website for anyone to take.
A journal is prestigious because the papers it publishes have an allusion of quality, because they are published by a prestigious journal.
A prestigious journal publishes high-quality papers because it can attract high-quality authors and reviewers, because it is a prestigious journal.
A journal is prestigious because researchers choose to (try to) be published in it, because their articles will be widely read by other researchers, because it is a prestigious journal.
If you were trying to bootstrap a new journal, you'd have a tough time; unless you didn't care about its quality.
The bare minimum would be a staff who have the time and skill to sift through obviously junk papers and then know which reviewers to use for the legitimate papers. Your best bet would probably be to assemble a staff of well-regarded researchers in whatever field(s) you wanted the journal to cover.
If I publish a paper in Nature, Nature Genetics, Science, etc. then I can hand-pick my next position. The more glam-journals I publish in, the better my chances for tenure.
The product of publishing isn't the dissemination of insight and innovation, but of gold stars academics can put on their resumes.
Sci-Hub doesn't just threaten copyright, but the entire status factory.
Papers in fancy journals are more prestigious, but the papers that get cited the most are the ones with full text freely available on the Web. So, when they can, scientists choose both.
(The better way to do this is to support a publisher that's both high-quality and open-access and submit to their journal.)
Further, we academics are incentivized, in terms of career, to publish in prestigious venues managed by official publishers. We aren't incentivized to publish in open access repositories as well. So, even though most of us want our articles to be disseminated widely, not all of us can find the time to make sure that the paper is also available on an open repository. This is a factor that explains why many articles are not available for free online even in cases where it would be legal for researchers to upload them.
In my field of computer science (visual analytics / visualizations) at least some of the leading journals/conferences officially allow you to put a version of the paper on your website.
Just today we submitted a paper where the copyright form explicitly mentions that.
Usually I don't have any difficulties finding contemporary papers. It is papers from, say, thirty years ago, that are usually stuck behind paywalls.
It is not used as broadly as arxiv.org, but that may be starting to change.
I work in CS and I know that if I want my paper to be read by the community I have to publish in a conference and/or arXiv, as almost no one read journals in CS. But then comes one of the almost infinite assessments the bureaucratic system in my university and country makes me jump through, and what do they look at? Impact factors, and conference publications are worth next to nothing. So I constantly have to juggle between what is good for being relevant and known in the community, and what is good to keep my job, which are often incompatible.
This depends on country, though. In the US, I think the funding agencies have left behind the impact factor fetishism in CS and authors can (and often do) just publish in conferences. But in Spain if you don't publish in journals you just don't get a position in academia, in fact some universities are starting to require > X ISI JCR-indexed publications to be able to become a PhD. And I have heard that in e.g. China it's the same thing.
You 're fortunate. I bet sci-hub is mostly used by life scientists.
You might notice that universities which recommend to their researchers to self-publish do not even show up in any university ranking.
One of the advantages of publication is peer review. When you cite someone's work, if it's in a reputable journal then you can assume that someone reviewed it and would vouch for the quality of the research. You have to take it with a pinch of salt (reviewers are never totally unbiased and they make mistakes), but in fields where research is easy to verify like computer science, a publication in somewhere like Pattern Recognition holds a lot of weight.
If you just cite a random paper that someone's self published on arXiv, you have no real idea whether what's being presented is true. Again, this isn't so much of a problem for CS papers where you can implement and test the work yourself, but for fields like physics where you're relying on other people's data, you want to be sure that someone smarter than you checked the numbers.
My client (who will remain unnamed) insists that I advocate for his position: Just as a work-for-hire belongs to the party who paid the creator, surely it matters that the creator signed a contract with a publisher giving up rights to distribute the work in return for invaluable services? Are you implying that the creator retains some sort of "moral right" to distribute copies of the work to whomever despite the explicit stipulations of the contract?
Next you'll want to tell me that just because the free market price of an essential medicine is prohibitive, one government should be allowed to flaunt another government's lawfully issued patent just for the benefit of its citizens! Much as you might wish otherwise, in the eyes of the law there simply is no "clear bright line" between infringing on copyright and slaughtering a ship's crew at sea in pursuit of treasure to bury.
[1] http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/upload/_FILE_1370804282.pdf Apologies for the spurious copyright notice at the top. Clearly it's not under copyright, since the author died over 70 years ago! 73, in fact.[3]
[2] http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/duress
[3] So as to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", in 1976 Congress passed a 47 year extension to the previous 28 year copyright term (for works that had not yet entered the public domain) giving them a total term of 75 years. Then in 1998 (shortly before the copyright for Mickey Mouse was set to expire[4]) it was realized that even greater progress could be obtained with a slightly longer term. To further promote said progress, the duration of copyright was retroactively extended to be the greater of 75 years since publication or 70 years after the death of the author. Unless it's a work of corporate authorship. Since corporations don't have a natural lifespan, it's only fair to extend the copyright on these works to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication. In any case, it's clear that "Blackmask Online" couldn't hold any copyright, since all they did is format a public domain text into a PDF!
[4] http://artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyrig...
I'd like to know their revenue, and a full price list per journal they publish.
I very much believe that if we looked at what they make in profits, we'll see that they can't justify how much they charge. I, for one, have no sympathy for them.
How might that look? I mean purely publishing isnt just ideal as it lacks the so-called quality control and prestige of established publications.
What might be a middle ground for disrupting this crappy monopoly on the world's knowledge?
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-elsevier-boycott...
Open Access exists, but you don't get the status you need from it (and weirdly it often costs a couple hundred dollars for the graduate student to publish their paper open access in addition to the Journal).
It'd be nice if there was a way to make the community more like open source software where you get status from sharing and collaborating instead of from hoarding information in fear of being 'scooped'.
As it stands the incentives are directly opposite collaborating and sharing information and really the best parts about science and research.
- built on a foundation of open source software
- new ways of presenting and consuming should be encouraged and easily discoverable
- completely outside the influence of the current publishing industry
There's a community of us working on this stuff. We hang out on gitter (https://gitter.im/codeforscience/community).
I believe we need a directory of scientific findings of sorts. It should be possible for each finding to cite other findings it relied on, thus creating a graph of influence/significance. The current situation with citations often involves friends citing friends , so i don't consider it reliable. It should also include open questions , thus giving research directions.
> In 2015, Elsevier reported a profit margin of approximately 37% on revenues of £2.070 billion.
Whatever they may claim their costs are, the money does not add meaningful contribution. The meaningful contribution (writing and reviewing) is done by scientists themselves, almost 100% independently of elsevier. Elsevier employs some senior editors who decide which reviewer gets to review which paper, and that's about their entire contribution to scientific process. The rest is their website costs, PR and fluff which is not relevant to the science itself.
They get the research papers for free, the editors don't get paid ... it's such a scam, and always has been.
EDIT:
Their other domains:
https://sci-hub.cc (uses sci-hub.io certificate)
https://sci-hub.bz (uses a separate certificate and ip address -- 104.28.20.155)
And a tor site: scihub22266oqcxt.onion
The fundamental difference of content-addressed networks is their resiliency in the face a single authority trying to track down all of the sources that have copies of the content.
Even though IPFS is still in its infancy, one of its primary goals is to solve the problem of content suddenly disappearing from the Internet.
I don't know that the sci-hub underlying database is available outside of the site. I expect with growth they will need to move to torrents or similar to minimize their bandwidth requirements.
yes, although their bandwidth is horrible
.org was their original domain which was pulled a while ago.
They are still posting updates there. Hopefully they don't get that pulled too.
You want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free.
Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given for free. Hmmmm.
I really hope the final standard didn't have any substantive changes, so that my implementation is correct. But all I can really do is cross my fingers since it at least seems to work with available data.
Charging for standards has a direct negative effect on the proliferation of those standards, especially today when a lot of code is written as open source hobby projects, which are left out in the cold.
Then, once you've found a source, always remember to bookmark it and save a copy. They disappear from search indices quickly, despite the site still being around. It also helps to repeat your search periodically as sometimes the "shifting sands can uncover treasure momentarily" ;-)
Also put some form of anonymous contact info in your profile. Low chances, but who knows...
EDIT: Looks like your account has a bit of history to it. If there isn't anything particularly identifying in there, the above idea should be good.
Granted, a lot of work goes into these standards, and they don't come out of nowere, still
It gets even worse. I am working on software that confirms to guidelines set by the Dutch government for handling healthcare data. These Dutch national standards were actually (and justly!) made free instead of available at a fee because they became requirements instead of just guidelines. But these standards are (naturally) based on international standards. This is fine for the RFC's that are freely available, but for the three (!) relevant Dutch standards (NEN 7510, 7512, 7513) you would need access to another forty-ish (!!) ISO standards that may, or may not, be relevant to the section you are dealing with.
Of course even a single PDF for these healthcare ISO standards costs up to €100, to be paid in Swiss Francs…
It's not perfect, but it allowed me to implement an RFID data decoding library (ISO-28560) at my last job.
Now THAT is chuckle worthy.
The gall of these publishing companies never ceases to amaze.
The walled garden of academia is not so fruitful as outsiders are led to think it is.
We struggle year after year to pay salaries and still have money to buy the equipment and material we need for the projects, we don't have that much left to spend on buying access articles that we and our peers wrote and that we and our peers reviewed, all for free while some publisher makes millions on it.
[0]: http://library.sc.edu/p/Develop/Society/ThomasCooperSociety
That said, the best way to get a research paper in CS is to check the author or lab's website and, if it's not there, e-mail the first author directly.
Yup. Seems like civil disobedience from the research community. Pretty interesting to see a civil rights movement happening online. Who says you can't sit at home and be an activist? ;-)
Don't put yourself in a position where the lawyers are the only ones on your side.
For hypothetical crimes he could've committed had he lived? Because he certainly wouldn't be in prison for things he actually did.
Had Aaron pleaded guilty, he'd be out by now as both of the plea agreements he was offered would have meant 6 months or less .
And trial? Why would he have gone to trial? There was no question of his guilt.
Also FWIW, so am I and it's not all that bad.
I don't personally believe it would've achieved anything, but that's how the world works.
Could any of the 4 downvoters clarify in what conceivable scenario would Aaron still be in prison if he was alive?
Had he pled guilty, he would undoubtedly be out by now. And going to trial obviously wasn't a realistic option considering the plea deals he was offered (BTW If someone here disagrees about that, I'd really like to know why.).
Read:
http://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
And that's why plea deals are an injustice. The honest are intimidated into felons, and the criminals never face a judge.
The law may not be just, but there's little doubt that he violated it.
Considering his charges, Swartz received exceptionally good plea deal offers.
Precisely. He didn't have to kill himself, and if he'd put a bit more forethought into what he was doing, we'd probably be discussing this in a thread around an interview with him rather than with Ms. Elbakyan. But nobody wants to hear that, because it detracts from the story of this generation's Bobby Fischer.
Incidentally, this is why I often dislike downvotes by those who don't comment directly on non-troll comments. It doesn't add a damned thing to sensible discourse, it just smacks of punitive actions against those they disagree with. You really notice it on certain topics, like Aaron - but for some reason it really occurs in anything Apple related.
Let Elsevier go down in flames. I have published more than 50 academic papers and have actively avoided Elsevier. To be honest, this was not too difficult, as they have a lot of journals addressing specialized subtopics that rather seem to appeal to manuscripts that were rejected in first tier journals.
[0] -https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay...
That's for one midrange article.
This doesn't even feel wrong. These parasites had it coming.
It still feels wrong when popular artists do not get paid for their work because it's more convenient for people to pirate it.
I mean, creative/artistic efforts take a lot of time, regardless of how easy reproducible the results are. By paying for their previous songs, you're basically funding their next songs, something you should be interested in as a fan.
Popular artists barely get paid for the sale of their music. They earn the bulk of their money from touring and merchandise sales (see: finite things).
Given that, piracy is actually far more detrimental to the publisher/label than it is to the artist because it could mean an additional fan to purchase another ticket at a show or buy another t-shirt at a merch table.
In fact, by charging money for the music, it actively discourages people from listening to it because they can't afford it or already spent their budget on artists they already know and like. In an industry where gaining fans is the most important thing you can do, this seems counterproductive.
Personally I stopped chasing music or movies. Mostly because nothing of that era appeals to me anymore :D (I also abused it younger and don't feel the need to binge watch as before and also prefer to pick a few stuff to give money to to support creators putting nice work).
That said, I do grab some old alternative stuff from time to time. Quite often they're not buyable anyway. Release the krakens hollywood.
We should strive for a logical explanation that transcends emotional response.
1 + 1 = 2, regardless of how I feel about the numbers or operators.
The fact that the distribution cost is close to zero is irrelevant.
The problem with copyright is that a big proportion of the price charged is basically cartel/gatekeeper protection money, and has no useful relationship to the true social cost/value of creative work.
Before I wrote book X, there were no copies of book X in the world. The supply was zero, not infinite.
After I wrote book X, the supply was one. Then it grows as people make copies. Copyright law can limit the growth, certainly. (Or enhancement, as the potential profits help promote distribution.)
But copyright law is meant to encourage the growth from 0 to 1 by making it possible to make money from the growth from 1 to N, before the lack of copyright protection makes it effectively infinite.
It's true that plenty of people will write even without getting paid. It's also true that plenty of people wrote because they will get paid. Heinlein started writing to pay off his mortgage.
Copyright law is also the basis for free software. If you take away copyright law, you end up supporting proprietary software distributed only as compiled machine code, not reusable source. This to "impoverishes" the human race.
Developing voting, flagging, moderating mechanisms, that's what many developers have done for years now on the web. Obviously you wouldn't rate papers like reddit comments but plug arxiv/sci-hub to a system allowing researchers to say what papers they reviewed, what their degree of approval is, eventually where it's been published, who references this paper etc. Seems like Arxiv has an endorsement system but as they say "The endorsement process is not peer review", just a way to reduce spam. Isn't there anything done on this subject ?
As a non-academic but with some insight there - this matches with most research, I think. Upvoting at a heat of the moment is kinda worthless as it comes to rating academic output. You need quite a lot of time to draw valid conclusions about a paper. If everyone voted for every paper this would mean that a huge chunk of the competent population would spend an inordinate amount of time on a single paper.
That's why it's far more efficient that only a few people of more-or-less guaranteed competence spend considerable effort in reviewing results. One high-quality vote is much better than thousand low-quality ones.
This efficiency mechanism and validating the qualifications of the reviewers is the only added-value the established publication systems brings in to the table as discoverability has become cheap commodity.
While I can and do access materials from libraries, including online access, Sci-Hub is both more complete and far more reliable and convenient. Find a resource, plug in the URL or DOI, and I've got it. Versus locating the same reference independently through one of several distinct libraries, each with their own multiple subsystems, authenticating, and sometimes, sometimes not, securing the material.
Another point Bohannon failed to address, which is covered in the discussion here, is the role of journal publishers as gatekeepers not only to content but to careers. Academics, increasingly squeezed by budget retrenchments and awful working conditions[1], must publish through prestige journals in order to establish and advance their careers.
Journal publishers are rent-seeking at both ends of this channel.
Sci-Hub, or as I like to call it, the Library of Alexandra, hs a tour de force demonstration that information is a public good, and that information access wants, and needs to be free. Sci-Hub isn't a complete answer to the problems of current academic publishing (again: publish or perish), but it's a relief valve for many, and an absolute and irrefutable proof of the pressing demands for access.
________________________________
Notes:
1. See the amazingly awful story of a young newlywed biology postdoc who lost her arm in a lab explosion involving an improperly instrumented gas cylinder in which oxygen and hydrogen were being mixed under pressure. This after repeatedly reporting short circuits and electric shocks from the equipment.
http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2016/03/postdoc-loses-arm-in-...
My understanding is that it's more a _bibliographic management_ tool.
There's also Calibre, which seems like it's a close solution, though that too is problematic, particularly at scale.
Another problem is that my laptop (as opposed to tablet) isn't particularly useful for reading formatted documents -- PDFs can't really be viewed _either_ one-up or two-up, and FBReader, which I like on mobile, formats ePub and similar eBook formats poorly (too wide, insufficient paragraph separation, unfamiliar controls), which is frustrating as well.
The tablet's much superior for _reading_ but even worse for _organising_ material.
It can also extract text from those files, for use in a text search.
I use it on a laptop, not a tablet. I see there are Zotero apps for a tablet. I have no experience with them.
http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-revi...
The amazing thing is that weeks after the paper hits arxiv, new papers are coming out, improving on the previous one. By the time the paper is accepted and the conference rolls around, it's actually almost old-hat.
* There is only one round of reviews, with a binary accept/reject outcome. In case of rejection, feedback cannot be incorporated. In case of acceptance, there is basically no incentive for incorporating feedback, as the paper is already "through" and putting in any more time is considered a waste.
* Assigning papers to reviewers is very arbitrary and often the reviewers are not at all familiar with the field. Getting a paper reassigned to another reviewer is often so complicated and time-consuming that reviewers just do the bare minimum (if asked to rate novelty/originality etc., on a scale 1-5 they give it a "3", which given the usual acceptance rate of <50% means the paper will get rejected).
* Reviewers usually get a lot of papers to review. They don't have time (who does?) but have to finish by a two-week deadline. If one of the papers is relevant to the research of the reviewer or has been written by colleagues they know (double-blind does not help, you recognize who wrote it..), that paper will receive attention; the other papers are seen as distraction and are dealt with as outlined above.
Peer-review is important, though. Some fields of research, particularly those where a lot of research is done by actual practitioners and not just pure research scientists, are mostly driven by conferences with short (one page or less) abstracts without full papers. There are often very few citeable sources that have been peer reviewed; conference websites and abstract books vanish over the years. An arxiv-like repository can help with that, but it does not solve the problem of peer review. Community-run open-access journals seem to provide a solution, but rarely take off.
Am I the only one who thinks this is just the location of AWS us-east-1? People might be using proxies located there or have bulk download jobs.
As I recall, reprints cost on the order of $0.50 each in the early 80s. Based on http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ that's about $1.20 in present dollars. That's a lot less than $30.
It used to be that they put a lot more effort into editing and typesetting for print, but they don't do nearly as much nowadays. You just send them your TeX file and if something is wrong they tell you to fix it.
As an outsider who doesn't have any experience with scientific papers and how to get them, it seems very obvious to me that there should be a huge demand for an open platform to publish and read those papers - from authors and readers alike. Why does this role need to be filled by an at best semi-legal party like SciHub?
The fact that users with legitimate access to those papers actually opt for SciHub to get them confirms that the current solutions just aren't working for their users. So why would authors rely on them?
Packing up and creating a new open access journal is possible, but it's hard, because essentially you need a critical mass of the highly regarded members of the community to go with you, because the real power is in the the reputation that the community provides. It's hard to do, but is possible. Linguists are moving from Elsevier published Lingua to a new open access journal called Cognition.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/elsevier-...
Serves me right for not actually reading the article I only remembered enough of to successfully google it.
It just so happens that for most scientific areas, the high impact journals are all owned by publishers.
However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?
The World
Then even within each conference there's a tier. Posters are the least, full papers are the most.
At each tier, submissions are competitive. This is where the peer review takes place.", and mostly it comes down to reading how the experiments were done and of the conclusions made sense given the experimental setup, and how well the paper is written.
Yes. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the current publishing system. But it seems there is room for a more modern publishing agency that can take the best of the old publishing model and combine it with digital age thinking.
Whether publishers give away their papers openly can make or break their business.
Where researchers publish in open or closed journals can make or break their careers.
Which journals libraries subscribe to can make or break their .. librarian's careers? Hopefully this link in the chain gets broken by Sci-Hub.
As an analogy, people who pay protection money or bribes are still part of the corruption and the mafia or corrupt politicians couldn't function without their support.
Of course, the editors of those journals could try to switch to another form of publishing, but they can't take the journal's name with them, and the move would require guts that, unless many do it, may not be justified. Think about it this way: the entire faculty of Harvard can decide to move to a no-name university, but the name Harvard alone would still carry a lot of weight, and every professor who stays behind lowers the effectiveness of the move considerably.
There are tons problems with the current publication system, but as I wrote up-thread, I think it's unfair to put tons of blame on individual scientists, many of whom are trapped between "playing the game" and making a somewhat ineffective individual stand.
"it should in principle be possible to run a journal for almost nothing. The legacy publishers (as they are sometimes called) frequently call people naive for suggesting this, so it is important to have actual examples to prove it, and Discrete Analysis is set up to be one such example."
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...
The publisher provide a valuable service to authors. Their online submission protal was a joy to use and their staff very friendly and responsive. Once a panel has decided that my submission was at least fit for further consideration it was forwarded to three peer-reviewers who may and may not be reimbursed for their time. After several rounds of comments and changes, the accepted draft was sent to a publishing house in India for typesetting and proofreading (They've done a very thorough and professional job with it) before it was ready for print. There are a lot of man-hours spent of making this happen and if the hours were billed individually it will add up to a pretty hefty sum. Earlier versions of this paper had been submitted to other journals and were eventually rejected - more hours of work done without output.
Open access journal such as PLOS ONE charges a non-trivial sum ($1500 and up) to cover these costs and all I could say is that you get what you paid for: How much does a good lawyer/consultant charge per hour? Most people only submit to OA journals if they are ideologically compelled or have ran out of other avenues.
The quibbles between Elsevier and librarians is actually an old one (the article linked below dates from 2003) because they own a number of high impact journals and can bundle less popular titles with high impact ones to increase their margins. While this is a pretty underhanded tactic to use, these less circulated journals would probably have gone out of print without the practice.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6964/full/426217a...
Piracy has been around as early as universities had been around. There were more than one usenet groups dedicated to these activities and reddit's /r/scholar remains as its latest iteration. I was quite active on a medical forum where doctors and academics help each other out with paywalled papers on a quid pro quo basis. (Doctors are probably the most affected since their job requires access to latest research articles yet few hospitals have the budget for it unless they are affiliated with a university) All because there will always be a few odd journals that are not covered by my university's subscription but others might do. Publishers mostly turned a blind eye because their use are limited to a small group of people who cannot be persuaded to pay anyway. Sci-hub is something different since it is much more accessible and comprehensive, which threatens the current business model of publications.
P.S. This thread from another HN front page submission offers an interesting parallel on paywalls and access to journalism.
Your phrasing implies that there are journals in your field that regularly pay their peer-reviewers. As far as I know, it's really rare that journals pay for peer review, and most of those only pay a token amount[1]. Are you actually unsure of this journal's policy, or is there some other reason you phrased it like that?
[1] http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20930/are-there-...
Of course, among small-medium size hospital systems the libraries are long gone. Some of the largest or those affiliated with universities may still have access in some form. It's an ironic development that so much more research is going on, yet less available to practitioners on the front lines.
At the same time publishers hardly spend any money - most of people access publications online, not printed, and tons of journals don't have minimal review. So publisher does nothing and wants much money for that.
Scientist at the same time are stuck - if you want people to read your paper, you need good journal or conference, else you might be not heard. Leave alone prestige and fame.
So, something has to be done. Maybe Sci-Hub is that something.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/alexandra-elbakyan-fo...
If you want source there is her comments on Russian website:
https://geektimes.ru/users/sci-hub/comments/ (most importantly latest one)
She's heavily downvoted there since most of IT-related audience in Russsia don't support autocratic regimes. She call that community downvoted her is "fifth column" (which in CIS is term for political opposition used by dictators fans) and censorship of internet resources that support political opposition is good thing.
There was other case when sci-hub community made some poll on their social network page about supporing what they doing and then banned everyone who voted against. Sadly it's harder to find source on this one since everything related to incedent is deleted and everyone posted about that is removed from their group.
There are only a few things that I can truly say I will watch wither and die with unconditional, unreserved glee, and the academic publishing industry is one of them.
As an example of what I mean, as of 2010, 91% of published pubs for the field of psychology supported their original hypothesis; if this isn't an obvious red flag, not sure what would be.
Intellectual fraud needs to be criminalized and claims based on science must require not only reproducibility, but solid means of denying the authors of any form of plausible deniability from escaping responsibility for what in many cases is fraud, or worse, blindly seeding their own bias as reality.
_______
[1] Quackery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery
[2] Positive Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
[3] Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
If someone wants to read it, here is a link: http://ujjwalg.com/blog/2013/5/3/the-problem-with-the-scient...
EDIT: A cash poor company.
One silly idea deserves another:
Generally, journals manage their subscriptions through filtering on IP address ranges.
Imagine a customer-ISP agreement that had an option whereby a subscriber could "opt in" to academic journals for a few extra dollars per month.
These subscribers might then be assigned addresses in certain designated ranges by their ISP.
Like iTunes for science. Go do it someone. I won't envy you, I'll expect you to fail but if you pull it off I'll be forever grateful.
like making sure the 1% get their rent-seeking royalties. The cost of distributing information is 0. Whatever negligible cost to keep the servers running can come from the "technology fees" universities charge their students.
Yet, it did. I'm told that the journals will never allow themselves to become antiquated and that they play a vital role in the review process. I'm seeing this being chipped away at slowly, and have to wonder if soon that small movement will accelerate greatly.
Academia is already plagued with too much research. Useless methodologically faulty research because every man and his dog wants to publish sometime, anything.
If they would have foresight, they would release all the papers they have into the public domain, and have there true opponents wrestle with the GPL and thus the allmende that produced the wealth. Instead they are having a nap at the ste ering wheel moment. In the end it will help mankind. So can we drop the charade and get on with it?
Although a few publishers allow the authors to provide a pdf of the paper in their personal home-page, they do allow it to be uploaded to an open access platform.
[1] https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/...
scihub22266oqcxt.onion
Doesn't seem like the journals actually provide much beyond asking professors to do stuff for free, both in terms of writing papers and reviewing them. Is inertia really worth letting them leech so much money and lock down access (antithetical to the whole idea of public-ation...) while they're at it?
Established faculty largely don't care because they are established (there are exceptions of course). Some new faculty would like to change it but if they do set up their own system it won't be taken seriously by the administration or senior faculty in charge of tenure review. There are also new faculty who don't know or care about these things so they just do what they know which is traditional publishing.
I was at a faculty development session a couple months ago. There were 20 faculty members there from various departments and the topic turned to open access journals. Some people were arguing that they weren't worth publishing in because tenure review boards haven't heard of them so they don't take them seriously. Then one guy - remember, this is a college professor - asked "where are these papers stored?" He wanted to know where the actual servers were physically located. And then he said, "This whole online thing seems like Big Brother."
That being said, things are changing and in some fields open access journals are seen as reputable and accepted but they are still new and in some fields (non-stem mostly) they are seen much more skeptically. So if you are in those fields and you want tenure you are going to try to get published in the old journals first.
But yes, entrenched interests hold everyone back eventually. They are currently being disrupted, and this time they lost the battle completely - there is not a single thing they can do to effectively keep their entrenched interests from crumbling.
Also, this might make a great use case for IPFS as apposed to torrents. Torrents are not designed to be mutable.
yes... but their bandwidth (seeding) is atrocious. Send help.
But you are right, preprints are not all that different from published papers, as this recent analysis confirmed: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363
[edited to add:] I suppose you could look at the data (https://blog.datadryad.org/2016/04/28/sci-hub-stories/) and see what proportion of requested DOIs have a preprint version in the arXiv. I suspect it's rather small.
This is one of them.
Thirdly, this time the bullies can't touch those who are distributing the work. One of the consequences of the pervasive reach of the Internet is that if pirated material falls outside of the jurisdiction of a nation that strictly endorses its copyright law then there is virtually nothing that nation can do about it.
When Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann prosecuted Aaron Swartz they thought they had struck a blow for copyright holders everywhere. And they did for a few years. Under three years later, however, the rules of the game changed and this time there is no one they could easily prosecute, because they are outside of their grasp and there is no way to persecute them, or make an example of them.
The established order has changed. Those who should have known better, who should have put conditions on publicly financed research to be open to all instead allowed greedy and amoral companies like Elsevier to take the hard work of others and sell it for a profit, giving almost nothing back to the system they are pillaging. Too late they choose to open the door slightly ajar to make those on the outside think they will be granted access, only to slam that door shut before they can get inside. Too late do they realise that a gentleman thief has broken in and distributed their ill-gotten gains to the ones they stole from.
Those who ruthlessly pursued the Aaron Swartz's of the world have finally been undone. Their arrogance and rapacity blinded them to the reality that they cannot deny information to the world. They did not heed the words of those who enabled the digital revolution. This struggle was predicted by Stewart Brand in 1984, who said to Steve Wozniak at the first Hackers Conference in Marin County, San Francisco:
"On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is lower and lower all the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other." [1]
That tension continues, but the old guard is now fighting a rear guard action. They will fight back, but they will remain in retreat until one day they give up, or are forced to and information becomes free. On that day be thankful, because the bindings of the ones who wish to shackle your mind and creativity will have lost the power to do so, to the incalculable good of humanity.
And besides Scihub, there are emerging institutional solutions to this problem, like research funders demanding that research paid with public funds must be publicly available, and universities setting up academic repositories where papers published elsewhere are available in open access form.
I have a couple PhD student friends, who give me first hand account of biology articles being inaccessible in 2nd world countries due to paywalls and financial limitations of research facilities. It is holding back research in just about every field, I suppose.
The site, it seems, is a part of natural social movement, similar to FOSS, rather than paid content piracy. It is against restrictions.
When some parasites are trying to construct a paywall then society sooner or later would find the way around it, be it knowledge or any other form of digital content - selling an output of the sendfile syscall by those who haven't produced anything would never been tolerated, it violates the hardwired notion of fairness. Especially when one assumes that these papers has been written to spread knowledge and contribute to scientific community (a-la contrubution to open source), not to make money by selling copies - it isn't a paperback.
>>Among the few things she would not disclose is her current location, because she is at risk of financial ruin, extradition, and imprisonment because of a lawsuit launched by Elsevier last year.
Elsevier should be condemned for its greedy acts. People should send them letters of condemnation for their greedy acts, including for this lawsuit.
We can send them e-mails and therein can state, something on the following lines:
>>>
Publisher,
I, a member of academia, am concerned about the hurdles you have put in the path of the progress of science and education. I condemn your behavior and also condemn your decision to file a lawsuit against a person named "Alexandra Elbakyan" to throttle her efforts to spread the publicly funded research knowledge to the public without any "middlemen" like you. I applaud her efforts behind the sci-hub project that was far long due. You might have forgotten by now, but due to, and/or by, the middlemen like you, a noble person named Aaron Swartz was harassed to no end and it must be due to the pain and stress inflicted in that harassment he committed suicide. Please wake up and get rid of your mean tactics and save whatever little goodwill you might have managed to retain. No thanks, as I cannot thank you.
<<<
Personally I have sent them a mail to this effect. Haven't got any response, it seems obvious.
Are there any legal repercussions that these mean, greedy publishers can pursue to harass the email senders, especially in USA? I am not from USA. Legal experts there can advise.
No need to mention, I am a huge fan of Alexandra Elbakyan and Aaron Swartz. They are great heroes of modern times. The thoughts of Aaron bring tears to my eyes. They are legendary and remind me of (may be fictional) Robin Hood [1].
I also thank all the academics who are actively helping the sci-hub project and all the people who are helping in their own capacity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood
edit: added thanks to all academics and people.