Websites offering pirated papers are shaking up science | Hacker News Reader

Websites offering pirated papers are shaking up science

economist.com

121 pointsdoener73 comments

I dont get it, how is it shaking up science.

The heading is illogical. The article starts with how the film industry is being affected by piracy. Then it says that a court has granted a publishing platform damages from sci hub. Then in the next few paragraphs it lists the countries with the most users of the sci hub websites. Then it ends with how the creator of sci hub will be awarded a Disobedience award by MIT, which she likely wont attend...

I was expecting a detailed analysis of how something like sci hub affects research and science, not the middleman companies that earns from the research.

>An analysis of Sci-Hub’s server logs, published in Science in 2016, found its biggest users were people in Iran, India and China. Such middle-income countries do not qualify for the subsidies big publishers provide to users in the poorest nations, but their universities nevertheless may not be able to afford subscriptions.

That alone could potentially have far reaching consequences. I agree that the article is a bit light on details though.

Yeah, that may be true.. But Scihub is an onion site. That means there's not much in the way of "who", but in the way of last hop before hitting the onionsite.

And I would daresay that one should probably not trust logs when going through Tor.

I expect very few people visit scihub on Tor. The logs may be for scihub.cc, then?

The article doesn't have a link but likely refers to users accessing the clearnet mirror, sci-hub.cc

> >An analysis of Sci-Hub’s server logs, published in Science in 2016, found its biggest users were people in Iran, India and China. Such middle-income countries do not qualify for the subsidies big publishers provide to users in the poorest nations, but their universities nevertheless may not be able to afford subscriptions.

How did Science get Scihub's server logs? Did scihub give them to Science? It's annoying that the economist is not linking to this supposed Science 2016 publication. If they did, I would have known how to access and read that publication (because I know this one website which would let me read it).

> It's annoying that the economist is not linking to this supposed Science 2016 publication

The Economist's usual readership is literate and can use search engines. The Science publication is literally the first result of the obvious search term.

The readership of Science journal itself is literate and could use search engines. But they do the obvious task of linking to relevant references.

If the Economist is in the business of distributing information, linking to a journal should sort of be one of the things they do. Even Buzzfeed and such outlets now do the common courtesy of linking to papers that they are talking about.

This is very standard for the Economist. It used to be a good magazine, and occasionally still delivers a superb long form article (usually about the financial/corporate world), but its editorials are just a lazy mishmash of bullet points.

John Micklethwait, the old editor, left for Bloomberg. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the new editor, is nowhere near as good.

I have no insider knowledge about the relative merits of the two, but Micklethwait left LONG after the decline in quality started.

Elsevier and others represent a massive and punishing private tax on the basic operation of science and academia. It's a scam but it's so ingrained in academic culture that very few groups of scholars seem willing or able to break away from it. They basically steal copyright from the authors of these papers, they don't compensate the authors or the peer reviewers, but they collect outrageous prices from libraries and individuals for access to already-publically-subsidized research. It's utterly depressing that they continue to exist.

> they don't compensate the authors or the peer reviewers,

I suffered reading peer reviewed articles on Elsevier or IEEE with unremarkable results at best, irreproducible results at worst.

The title goes "Novel Way of Breaking a Glass", an abstract that describes the methodology as "dropping a file cabinet on it", and the talent (yes, talent) to come to the conclusion that "file cabinets could prove useful in breaking trees or pierce underground bunkers in the future". Are you kidding me, Dr Bozo et al?

I've had to wade through hundreds of insipid articles which made my feeling of being stupid more bearable but diminished my respect for many things shrouded with a veneer that come at $35 a pop.

Not many people would mind a company making a small profit from tax-funded research, if they are offering a value-added service, but the scale of Elsevier profits is ludicrous. It is one of the most profitable large companies on the planet.

Clearly Elsevier are profiting from their near monopoly in this area and something really needs to be done about them.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

"Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, described knowl-edge in the following way: “he who receives an idea from me,receives instruc-tion himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”. In doing so, Jefferson anticipated the modern concept of a public good. Today we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global or international public good.We have also come to recognize that knowledge is central to successful development. The international community,through institutions like the World Bank, has a collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global public good—knowledge for development."

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Public Good"

http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz

> Elsevier argues that there is more to publishing than simply shovelling papers online and that work such as editing and arranging for reviews has to be paid for.

It's funny how arranging for reviews has to be paid for, but the work of reviewing doesn't.

Not just reviews. Elsevier doesn't fund any of the scientific work, but it didn't stop the article from comparing them to record companies and film studios in the very first sentence.

That really infuriates me.

In the fields where I worked, I've had to read dozens of papers by teams from Turkey, China, the Slavic countries, and other places. People whose command of their field was far ahead of their command of English. People who submitted to Elsevier. And whose papers received no amount of copy-editing whatsoever. It was so bad, you could tell the authors' nationality by their grammar errors. Slavs would drop the definite and indefinite articles. Turks would refer to people as "it." Chinese authors would mix plural and singular inappropriately.

If they just spent a minimum on copy editing, I would pay the fees on every paper I needed. But they didn't even have the decency to do that.

There was a good article on the vast money charged by these journals in the Guardian last week. Although the publishers business does seem pretty robust, there are at least winds of change from universities and governments who fund this research that are finally saying enough is enough...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

If anyone is interested in a former researcher turned Open Access publisher's observations on the issues: https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896

Hopefully something charges this time. Last time (i.e. around 2010) the publicity campaign failed. Back then university librarians managed to create some awareness about the extortionate price of journal subscriptions, but that's all they did, prices didn't decrease.

The trouble is, there are certain core journals that are really needed and many crap journals. Subscriptions come in packages, i.e. a library can't choose to keep Cell and get rid of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, they can only cancel Elsevier altogether. That's why the campaign failed last time, there wasn't a critical mass ready to unsubscribe from everything to convince the publishers to get their act together. Maybe this time, with Scihub, things improve.

I predict that Elsevier & friends are going to use their influence on Congress to implement internet filtering at universities to keep Scihub out. It worked for the music/film industry.

Did someone pull the strings at Economist to publish this editorial in order to respond/damage control the Guardian piece? (obviously it's just my speculation but coincidence is also only one of the plausible explanations)

Super misleading Economist headline and subheading: "Websites offering pirated papers are shaking up science: Musicians and moviemakers are not the only ones to suffer from internet piracy"

If you come to this topic from an essentially blank slate, the headline and subheading would make you think that /science/ and /scientists/ are suffering from piracy (in analogy to the claim that musicians and moviemakers are).

Except very likely the opposite is true: this piracy offers much greater exposure to scientific literature and enables access to otherwise-inaccessible scientific knowledge for scientists in poorer nations.

Unlike musicians and moviemakers, scientists make ZERO money from publication royalties of journal articles but they (or their institutions) have to /pay/ for access to these journals. The only ones making money are the publishers.

Well, in deference to the dramatic title, there are also negative consequences and not only those positive ones.

For instance: It seems logical that the average quality of science goes down when peer-reviewing is optional. Likewise, corrections and redactions are not guaranteed to take place.

The real game change will be if/when pirate publishers force traditional publishers to drop their profit models, and the best of both worlds can be achieved.

> average quality of science goes down when peer-reviewing is optional

where was this claim made?

You also need to show that current peer review is happening and is effective at identifying bad science, and that corrections and redactions are currently guaranteed to take place.

Both of those are questionable.

Send them bitcoin if you wish to support them:

SciHub: 1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM LibGen: 1Gz3SZniRo8isQzgPiuovr11n3s75zecg2

> 1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM

I don't know where you got that, but it's not the actual bitcoin address of SciHub. http://www.sci-hub.cc/donate

edit: It's the one on their home page: http://sci-hub.cc/

Looks like they have two? On the front page, when you scroll down "support the project" they display the one I pasted.

With all my respect to your desire to support SciHub, it'd be better to link to a verified page with their bitcoin credentials.

I don't universally support this kind of thing but in this case I do. Nearly all of this research is directly or indirectly taxpayer funded. All taxpayer funded research should be freely available to us since we paid for it.

That and these gatekeepers are just bridge trolls that add zero value. It made sense back when journals were physically printed but today the distribution cost is zero.

That most of this research taxpayer funded is indeed a good argument.

Beyond that, people criticized other disrupted industries for continuing to provide poor customer service -- seemingly unable to fight back after decades of treating customers as captive audiences, and taking them for granted. Well if you think the music industry was bad at that, the academic publishing industry is way worse. These guys typically provide no significant value add, yet they want large economic rewards. Meanwhile, journal after journal has been shown incompetent to keep garbage papers -- even papers generated by Markov chains -- out.

My impression is that they also discriminate heavily against individual researchers, many of whom cannot afford exorbitant per-per paper fees, while large (typically subsidized) institutions get much better deals when they are able to afford bulk access.

> many of whom cannot afford exorbitant per-per paper fees

Whilst the publishers are certainly not pulling their weight, I don't think the biggest offenders have per-paper fees. The biggest offender is probably Elsevier, and as far as I know they make their money from selling subscriptions to research institutions and universities.

I don't have any real data on this... my comment was based on my own experience of not being able to afford per-paper fees and certainly not being able to afford subscriptions, whilst observing that the academic institutions seem to have no trouble maintaining access. No idea what the per paper fees would actually work out to for universities (say, the ones actually downloaded/accessed).

As someone who reads a fair number of papers, I definitely feel like the publishers' days are numbered, and not just because of Sci-Hub and LibGen. More and more often now, I can find papers that I want, legally, on the first try. Even more encouraging, I find that when I can't find a paper I often just have to wait a few months and try again to find an open Internet source.

Case in point: a few months ago I wanted this paper -- http://bit.ly/2tE4O4K -- but all the CiteSeerX links were broken and apparently had been for a long while. About two months later it's back. This is just one example, but I find this increasingly works with many papers.

There is also ResearchGate, which is a social network to get papers from an authors, which is legal if they are alive. But their sign-up process is also much harder for independent researchers. You have to "prove you are a researcher," as though attempting to get access to research papers weren't prima facie evidence of that.

In CS the worst paywaller is consistently the ACM.

I've found that sometimes, emailing one or more of the authors of a paper will yield me a copy.

I typically say I'm a "hobbyist researcher" or something of that nature, and will generally have a response in a week, if not quicker. This even sometimes works for papers just published. I always assure the researcher that it's for my personal use only, and won't be uploaded/republished (and I uphold that part rigorously). Sometimes I've been given extra stuff (source code, other data, etc), without asking for it.

So sometimes, you can just ask - and get a copy. It doesn't always work; sometimes you get ignored, or a polite refusal. But sometimes, you get a good response. And I really appreciate that as a hobbyist.

That said, most papers I like to find or obtain are older stuff (the older the better), which in many cases is difficult to impossible to find (I suppose with some travel and physical research I could get them, but that's outside my means and time). But sometimes, a scanned copy can be found, and in those rare cases where the researcher is still alive, I can sometimes get a copy by asking in that manner as well. Sometimes I have contact the last posted research organization (in those cases, I have been informed on occasion of their passing; but I'll usually get a link or something in return for the document).

In a way, it's a "squeaky wheel getting the grease" kind of move; I'm not obnoxious about it - if I don't get a response, I leave it at that. If I get a declined response, I reply with a thank you. Better not to burn any bridges, maybe later I can get a copy.

Ah, my bad I understood you wrong. I thought you meant per-paper fees for people submitting papers. Indeed many journals still have a paywall for papers.

Lol they charge to receive the papers, too?

Some very sleazy open papers do.

I don't think it is zero but where we have sites like wikipedia, they should be much lesser than the exorbitant prices they charge for subscriptions.

You can't read what you need but what the publishers think you should subscribe which is worse than proprietary software because this is Science - This has become the industry standard for journal publishers.

I agree. I have a hard time understanding pricey paywalls for academic publishing. The research is not funded by the company that paywalls, the researcher is not paid to do research or paid royalties by the company, and most importantly, the people who are actually paying for the work - the academic institution or other funders, want the work to be available easily in public domain (so that it may be cited, built upon, etc). I think its grossly unfair, in this age of convenient electronic distribution, that a middleman profits so much for something that should be fundamentally available to a lot of people. Sure there is a cost of maintaining servers and keeping things running, but is the cost really as high as what they charge?

I think the big publishers are not behaving rationally here, trying to fight a library based in Russia via American courts.

A much cheaper and effective alternative would be to simply bribe some Russian officials. If the bribe is big enough the websites will be gone in a week, owners arrested.

I'm pretty sure that is criminal.

And probably would not work. If this is a common expedient, at least with Snowden it didn't work.

Of course you would do it secretly.

Still, i would never recommend a big institucion to engage in criminal activities for its own benefit :)

I'm sure they'd love to but if the publishers are US-based, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes it a crime to bribe officials of foreign governments. The law is somewhat actively enforced:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-firms-say...

This is probably a very bad idea: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/foreign-corrupt-pract....

Economist paywalls are easily circumvented: a) Delete the element covering the content b) Disable or delete cookies

Most of the time, yes. Some sites like to be sneaky though and disable scrolling and other weird annoyances. A simple DOM event to check for certain elements existing would circumvent removing of the element. I would remove all events associated with said element (if they exist) first to prevent weirdness. Hell even developing a greasemonkey/tampermonkey script for that particular website would be easy enough, so you don't have to do that every time.

Economist also lets you a few articles per week for free. If you find yourself bumping against their paywall with any regularity, perhaps you should actually pay for the content? Or, would you like to live on an internet where the only content that can pay for itself is clickbait?

Economist only lets US citizen read a few articles per week for free.

I get on the first visit with a clean browser already that message.

University research is funded by the state in germany. Research results should thus live in the public domain.

I have no pity for those artificial paywall companies, benefiting from research funded with tax money. This model needs to change - fast. And the change should be supported by legislation.

This. A lot of long term research worldwide is publicly funded and the status quo of the scientific journals (that once had their place in a world with high communication barriers and costs) needs to be seriously shaken up. That plus the huge business around scientific conferences with most speakers having to pay to be able to present their findings.

But I guess the whole model in the scientific community might need rethinking. Most people are only worried publishing because that is the only measure that matters at the moment...

> Research results should thus live in the public domain.

Yes but not by paying humongous Open Access fees to publishers.

The irony of this article being behind a paywall.

Pastebin (or one of the many variants) should be put to use with anything like this.

I can't access the article, but in any event I wonder: doesn't it feel like this is actually being allowed? We're talking about hosted content, not torrents. Of course, many (including me) feel that this sharing of information can only advance society, but I'm surprised to sense that the establishment agrees.

I believe there have been takedowns of SciHub... it's why they host in multiple countries and maintain multiple domain names.

The society as a whole has to accept small violations of laws. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to improve laws. IMHO, it is a temporary tolerance because the correct final stance is not obvious.

> An analysis of Sci-Hub’s server logs, published in Science in 2016, found its biggest users were people in Iran, India and China. Such middle-income countries do not qualify for the subsidies big publishers provide to users in the poorest nations, but their universities nevertheless may not be able to afford subscriptions. Not every downloader was cash-strapped, though. Americans were the fifth-biggest users.

Let's be frank here, the people pirating these papers are capable of understanding them (to some extent or another), and being educated to the point of understanding new-ish papers necessarily implies that a relatively large amount of money is being spent on their education. This isn't entirely/primarily about money.

If the main users of this site are using it to get around sanctions placed against their country, the site becomes far less sympathetic in my eyes.

> If the main users of this site are using it to get around sanctions placed against their country, the site becomes far less sympathetic in my eyes.

I struggle with this. An opposing perspective is that there's a bunch of students who are trying to do their research and push science forward, but a country (or group of) half-way around the world has decided that they'd rather the student not have access to the world's body of research. I can see merits in both angles...

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