Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience
bjoern.brembs.net
bjoern.brembs.net
If you must publish in high-impact journals, and those journals are closed-access, then you must publish in closed-access journals.
Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. The rentiership is actually on the professional advancement track.
Corollary: it is only necessary for journals to retain the tenure committees on their side in order to keep their money-printing operation running.
When you've chosen the tenure track, you know you might be spending a decade at a school nobody has ever heard of pumping out research nobody is ever gonna read. There are some stars undoubtedly but there are only so many tenure track jobs. Academics have embraced that system for a long time, the journals are just a side-effect of that acceptance.
Counterpoint: if closed-access journals are no longer the constraint, how does that change the overall academic landscape? For better or worse?
Information filters will remain, and they will remain imperfect.
My personal academic experience has been that as the lowliest student at a uni you get access to everything anyway. If you're bored you can Google and grab the pdf. The closed nature hasn't been any real constraint and for the majority of researchers it isn't. You spend more time as a researcher filtering out material that is irrelevant and even now there are a ton of mediocre journals. To answer your question, the effect on the overall academic landscape will probably be minimal.
It's an obvious and easy target - hey, look at this cartel which dominates academia, but academia is a giant cartel, anyway, where everyone follows arbitrary restrictions and rituals because that's how you get a degree and a job. You can even argue (not sure it's believable) that this dynamic is useful - if you want to get access to the world's academic information, you need to get plugged into an institution with scholars around you who can help guide, inform, and interpret your work and the work of others and even if that isn't strictly necessary, it's more beneficial than not. If you're interested in "serious" research, you've probably already self-selected into this system of controlled but essentially free access already.
You'll also find that the question of who controls the mafia itself is of utmost significance to those who control the mafia.
Your comment is rather wide the point.
There are the people (including myself too) who will wish to read and to learn these thing even if not in any university and all of those "arbitrary restrictions and rituals". That way, you can learn more rather than being restricted.
The tenure should not be necessary either, to do. Anyone do.
Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate.
This only works if a truly top tier candidate who can continue to work without limitation in a Post-docs position. I.e. someone with the research equivalent of "fuck-you money". But it doesn't have to be all of them. When a 2nd tier institution can just make an administrative change and basically get a free 1st round draft pick, there's going to be institutions that take the deal. It doesn't even really hurt the scholar, because they really don't need to be at Yale, they can be successful anywhere with strong students and plenty of money.
Someone should write an article on that. And publish it ... Well, that's left as an exercise to the student.
To give another example of such a problem: If in urban areas everyone switched his WIFI router to some open mesh network software at the same time, the gains from this ad hoc network would be tremendous. But if only few switch, the gains are almost nonexistent and the losses can be high. So it's never going to happen.
You might want to look up Mancur Olson's "Logic of Collective Action", which deals with this problem, generally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv...
In a similar fashion software piracy can actually help large, established players. Take for example Photoshop, which back in the days was quite pirated piece of software. Adobe certainly lost some money, but I think the main losers were cheaper alternatives. Young and poor pirated Photoshop, learned to use it and when they got employed wanted to continue using Photoshop since that was the only package they really knew. If piracy had not been an option, many would probably have gone for other, more affordable alternatives.
An online book by UCLA economics professors Michele Boldrin and Mark Levine, making the case against intellectual property -- patents, and copyright most especially.
The opening chapter leads off with the patent battles of James Watt, which are credited by some authors with setting back the start date of the Industrial Revolution from 1769, when the patent was issued, to 1800, when it (after parliamentary extension) finally expired.
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstne...
Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
I don't blame them, probably not much choice to get a decent print run, but it's an interesting display of how pervasive copyright is.
See, I'm old enough to remember this battle starting for music and movies. We know how that ended.
But now, it's for the very knowledge that drives our civilization.
"Stallman was right", oh how that statement is going to get tested.
1. Film and music were always vaguely reasonably priced, and collecting a fee is totally reasonable - at least some of the money goes to the creators. This is not true for papers. The authors are never paid and the prices are insane.
2. Music & videos are luxuries, and are also somewhat fungible. If you need a specific paper (e.g. because it was referenced by another) you usually can't just swap it for another.
3. The actual files are usually a lot smaller than music and definitely smaller than films, so it will be easier to share entire libraries and hence harder to stop.
4. Morality is clearly on the side of sci-hub. Music/film piracy is much more ambiguous.
Also, in wealth terms, if you start with the reasonable assumption that a pirated copy doesn't directly translate to a sales loss, then piracy can be argued to be a net plus, since vastly more people "profit" from it (the people who download) than there are people who suffer from it (the people being pirated).
Just wanted to mention those arguments, since I rarely hear them in these discussions.
I think the reasonable assumption is that it translates on average to a fraction of a sale loss; less than one, but more than zero.
The argument "I'm pirating the fruit of your work and investment against your will, but trust me it'll be in your best interest, I know your interest better than you do" is untenable.
Academic work also costs money, but journals have tricked someone else into paying for it. Research gets done on government, corporate, and university budgets, submitters get no compensation, and reviewers do the hard work behind publication for free. Journals have been priced far above costs for decades, but with the advent of online distribution costs have sunk even further while prices continue to rise.
The best (moral) argument against piracy was always "if everyone does this, we won't get more media". That's not even true in the case of journals: it looks an awful lot like the system would find a way to work even at 100% piracy rates.
0. A huge amount of this research is publicly funded, and access to results is something we've already paid for via taxes.
Extremely affordable all you can eat subscription models?
These people have gotten their acknowledgments (as they should), let's not act like they are nobodies in the shadow of history. You're reading about them on HN precisely because media knows who they are. How many people have documentaries made about them after they are dead?
It used to be proprietary Software everywhere before GNU and Linux. Nowadays FSF has made FLOSS a good thing. Today we have FOSS everywhere. Even Microsoft which used to be a bastion of proprietary software now has Open Source projects.
Something similar to that needs to sweep the Academic publishing world otherwise progress will only slow down due to closed nature of existing literature.
Or I could just click the bookmarlet to search scihub...
I recognized the rotated scihub admin profile picture because I had met her in person at a Harvard conference in 2010. She was on my pidgin buddy list, of all things.
Opsec is super important, y'all. Even someone who likes scihub (such as myself) might accidentally doxx you when they get all excited about finding who you are (such as I did). I get the sense from the rotated profile pic and subsequent self-publicity that maybe anonymity hasn't been a top priority for her the whole time, maybe she had her name on it earlier than 2013?
I should have exercised more caution.
Further, suppose a person anonymously made a copy of a partial snapshot of sci-hub content. Would it be illegal for that person to post a public search engine that responds to requests for articles from the collection with a only the hash of that document?
Finally, suppose N scientists have the above public hash engines and claim they will mirror a randomly chosen part of sci-hub content when N+1 scientists make the same claim. For what value of N would you be willing to mirror sci-hub content?
They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J.
Likewise, if research output is difficult to access, the feedback loop between ideas and implementation is broken; folks outside academia can't easily comment on the cutting edge work in a field, and academics only have to worry about what other academics think of their work.
Another problem is that even if all the research in the world were freely available, only a small portion of the population would still seek it out.
Indeed, it's often misrepresented by science writers.
Fact of the matter is... few people have any incentive to read academic papers in general, and often cannot understand the language or formats used.
Some things can't be written for a general audience. It can not be distilled that much.
That isn't to suggest that citizen scientists should be discouraged, just that some things are actually pretty difficult to explain and to grasp.
To be very clear, I support open publishing. I just feel obligated to point out that most of the general public isn't going to understand and it isn't ever going to be written with them in mind.
I'm a mathematician. I don't understand some of it.
The fact that things cannot be written for a general audience doesn't mean that we need to limit access to information which cannot be understood by a general audience.
I was clear that I support open publishing.
I have also read many psycology papers, never had a problem with them.
But, absolutely keep reading, learning, growing, and sharing. I'm just not going to publish with the general public being the intended audience. On the other hand, I'm more than happy to try to explain stuff, for those who are curious.
I'd never discourage a citizen scientist. Never.
But, absolutely... The idea of the citizen scientist is so important to me. I have some complains about the scientific community but this may not be the place for that.
In a nutshell, science has become more complicated and generally requires much harder math than it used to. Case in point: Almost everyone can learn the basics of Newtonian Mechanics or Special Relativity, but understanding the basics of String Theory is much, much harder. Our scientific knowledge has grown immensely.
That being said, your implicit assumption seems odd to me. The "general public" was probably never able to read and understand academic papers and folks outside academia never were able to easily comment on cutting edge work at any time in history. (Except for a few very gifted outliers maybe.)
We're writing that way because we are the explicit intended audience anyway - the purpose of journals and conferences is not to write about our research and see who wants to read it, but entirely the opposite, to make up a venue that a particular research community wants to read and then ask for submissions that would be interesting to other researchers.
Public dissemination is not part of the research-publish feedback loop which drives the actual research, it's a (useful) output out of that loop but not really part of it.
The feedback loop is an exchange of novel research, not finding out "what others think of your work". If you've got a better method, that's interesting; if you've got a novel use case of a method that I know, that's interesting; if you've got experimental evidence that contradicts mine, that's interesting; but that's all novel research that would be publishable even with all the existing filters, and pretty much requires the person to be familiar with the field (by which I mean having spent at least hundreds of hours reading relevant research beforehand).
Comments, especially uninformed ones, have too low signal-to-noise to be worth reading - any active field of research produces more than a person can read anyway, so if anything the researchers want stricter filtering that reduces noise. That's a major purpose for the more selective venues; I want someone else to read and reject most of academic publishing so that I don't have to read it just to mutter the same objections that the reviewers would've had, just with more obscenities.
Being easy to circumvent is a big reason why these for profit journals still exist.
2. I've had authors claim they don't have right (or copies) of works. Mind, one of those is a well-known idiot, but still.
Friction reduction of Sci-Hub is amazing.
A site that makes LinkedIn's dark patterns look responsible is not the answer.
She is quite simply a hero, full stop.
This is why it sucks to have app stores and walled gardens. The vendors effectively become censorship agents for states. And Microsoft wants to take us in the same direction with Windows 10 S.
I downloaded the same file both directly from IEEE and sci-hub and the checksum did not match. I am a bit worried that sci-hub is/will be used to spread malware.
As new299 mentioned, this could be due to watermarking.
Suppose one is going to write a paper and he need to add a reference of another paper which he has got from Sci-hub. So is there any check or any sorts of things of originality of reference paper ?
(I don't know exactly how publishing works)
Is is also our duty as the people to reduce all expenditures on software? Is piracy justifiable especially within government institutions?
I guess my point is that necessary is a really strong claim and you can justify a lot of crazy stuff with that. Scientific progress has continued on just fine despite these cartels. With no supporting evidence I'd argue that today's scholars have hundreds of times the free information available than they did a century ago and that ramps up the further you go back. It's easy to imagine that Elsevier's lockdown of a paper is the difference between an academic breakthrough or not, but in reality that's probably not the case, even if it's a noble cause.
That public access to its own research is a good is clearly recognised (at least here in Australia) by universities, most of whose libraries are open to the public (as are the databases via in-library PCs, but not remotely). But you must be near one for this to be practically useful.
There is no counter-balancing force - journalist have no interest in debunking the myriad falsehoods. But the public has a real interest in knowing, particularly when there are health concerns.