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Comment by chias | Hacker News Reader

I feel a little tingle of excitement seeing my own papers on Sci-Hub. I mean I get that they're trying to index all publications so it's not a "stamp or approval" or anything... but it does mean that people can actually access the knowledge I tried to throw into the world, which was kind of the whole point in doing it.

I'd update my academic website to link my papers to their sci-hub URLs if I didn't think I'd catch a world of flak for it.

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IEEE and IEEE Explore have been actively going after professors and forcing them to take down links to their own papers. In the past, many professors hosted pdf's on their websites for their papers -- this has only stopped because IEEE has been forcing them off. Just wanted to add this for those who think professors have 'suddenly become stingy' -- no, they aren't - they were forced to.

i haven't heard this, this is interesting any links with more info?

Academia is probably keeping quiet since most of EE, CS, CE is heavily dependent on IEEE publications for reputation and career advancement and paper-reputation.

There would be complaints somewhere you can link to. I have a collection of over 15,000 papers. Many I got off of IEEE/ACM. However, many others I got by typing the name into Google and/or CiteSeerx to find same file. I still can usually get any file I think of and many are still on academics sites. Those are high-profile, too.

So, where's your evidence that IEEE can or is forcing PDF's off the net?

Interestingly, it's gone the other way in mathematics. It used to be that lots of journals required authors to sign some sort of statement saying that they wouldn't post PDFs on their web pages. (I remember one professor who had a page essentially saying "Here's the PDFs. Sue me, Elsevier!" Unfortunately, I don't remember who it was) Eventually, I think in response to the massive, overwhelming popularity of the arXiv, which I think most mathematicians would choose over journals if forced to choose, the big publishers decided, slowly, piecemeal, and behind the times as always [0], to go with the times and stop fighting something that was going to happen anyway.

[0] With an exception for the AMS, which has always (as long as I have cared, and checked, anyway) had publication policies that are as author- and reader-friendly as one can probably expect in the real world.

Citation needed. I have been hosting various IEEE papers on my websites for years and have never heard from IEEE.

My understanding is that CS publishers tolerate researchers hosting their own papers, but I'm very interested in evidence suggesting otherwise.

Really? I haven't seen this happening yet. I still self-host copies of my publications. I'm not sure how I (or others in the same position) would respond to a request to remove them from IEEE.

I felt that tingle too! I saw a book I co-edited on SciHub on the same day the publishers sent me a royalty statement reminding me that absolutely zero people want to pay 120GBP to read what I (my co-editors and contributors) put together through a whole lot of unpaid effort.

Why wouldn't they price at a rate that would generate some sales? Given that nearly all of the costs associated with the book would have already been paid?

I'm genuinely curious who you think would give you flak. Publishers? Your department faculty? The librarian at your university? Your peers?

(reason I'm interested: I'm on the board of Sage and have a board meeting tomorrow where I hope we'll be discussing sci-hub)

I'm mostly concerned about what my department would do under pressure from publishers and/or the government. Being part of a state university, publicly endorsing illegal actions is unwise on my part. Especially if they undermine the establishment that the school serves.

Thanks for the insight. I'm curious to follow it through and try to understand what you think practical repercussions would be. So say you have your CV up online with sci-hub links, and a publisher does somehow complain to the university. Wouldn't the worst that happens be you change it and say sorry? Or do you think there would be more serious consequences? Is being seen as "pro piracy" a black mark that would stay with you somehow?

I don't think there would be any real repercussions. But this close to the end, it seems foolish to bet the last six years of my life on a mildly amusing act of civil disobedience.

While I have complete faith in my department not being staffed with idiots and zealots, I have no similar faith in our government. Being a state school, that's ultimately who we answer to. The whole Aaron Schwartz debacle evaporated any faith I might have had in our government's ability to deal with this sort of thing like grownups.

SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work.

Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?

There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad issue.

Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture.

So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher).

The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.

Understand, thank you for everything you're doing - keep up the good work.

> In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research.

There is no cost of publishing your/my papers as open access. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Write paper, send to journal

2. Do the peer review hokey pokey until paper is accepted

3. Upload preprint version to preprint server (arXiv etc.), with link to journal version

If you're brave, you can do step 3 before step 2.

This whole concept of paying for open access is ridiculous and should go die in a fire.

That hokey pokey you refer to does cost money. So yes, you can use a system that has costs associated with it, then attempt to ensure those costs can't be recouped. But if that's successful the system will collapse. I assume you'd think that would be good in this case. But I find it funny reasoning to say you should opt-in to publisher-facilitated peer review while trying to tear it down. Wouldn't avoiding publishers altogether be the more ideologically consistent method?

If the collapsing part of the system is the one containing middlemen who earn millions taking advantage of free labor from academicians, it will be a success. The only current effect of sci-hub is that research is really open.

SciHub is costing around $50k a year to host 50 million papers for free. Elselvier makes a 37% profit margin on 2.07 billion pounds a year. Funny enough, SciHub shows Elselvier could host all scientific knowledge for under 1% of 1% of its revenue while making an operating profit. I'm sure we can find a better trade between widespread access and profitable management of that access than Elselvier. ;)

But no publisher is arguing that the hosting of PDFs is the expensive part of their business. If it was then you're right and researchers should just send their finished PDFs straight to sci-hub for hosting. But hosting a PDF is only a tiny, and as you've identified, an inconsequential part of the equation.

The other critical parts still don't result in a 37% net margin as it's basically labor. Most of it is low-skilled labor that should have plenty competition. The peer reviews of specific fields is high-skilled labor with decent to uncommon competition depending on size of field.

My claim still applies even if those costs are factored in. A yearly fee should be enough to cover everything. Charging $10-30 per article and such is just profiteering.

Yes, it costs money, but it's not being paid for by Elsevier. Referees receive zero money, editors receive zero (or perhaps a nominal fee). The copyediting costs a bit, but it is low-skill labor and can mostly be optimised away (many journals already accept camera-ready copies directly from the authors).

What I see publishers mainly providing is ranking and filtering (and branding to some extent). ACS has their top level journal (JACS) and several subfield-specific journals, and usually there are ACS journals with different prestige in each subfield. ACS, APS and other non-profit science organisations do a fairly good job at it IMO.

Forbidding for-profit publishers would be my preferred option.

This reminds me of that old Steve Martin movie, The Jerk, where the protagonist finds out that he's in the phone book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aIf1YnbbU

Quote" I'm in the phone book! Things are going to start happening for me now!"

Felt similar seeing my name on https://haveibeenpwned.com/

I know what you mean, it's great to feel like you've contributed to the sum total of humanity's knowledge like that.

And now my ego demands that I go check to see whether the one paper I've published is up on there! :D

These days you can just post the dois and mention scihub somewhere innocuous. The readers will figure it out and I'd love to see the publishers win when there is no direct link to the papers.

> it does mean that people can actually access the knowledge I tried to throw into the world, which was kind of the whole point in doing it.

I mean obviously it wasn't the whole point if you didn't publish them freely in the first place.

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