2. You submit novel research to the best journal you think will publish it.
3. The editor (the only person involved actually paid by the journal) invites other researchers to volunteer their time to peer review your research.
4. Assuming your research bears up under scrutiny and the peer reviewers are not actually competitors who decide to filibuster (this happens), your paper passes peer review.
5. Congratulations! The journal agrees to publish your novel research. For this, you must pay the journal. They do not pay you. You pay them. Color figures in the paper version nobody reads cost thousands extra.
6. Having been paid by you to publish your work, the journal sells your paper at exorbitant prices to university libraries (unless you paid them lots extra to just make it available for free).
Taxes pay researchers to pay journals and taxes pay for university libraries to pay journals. Why on Earth do intelligent researchers (or taxpayers) put up with this crap? Being published in a good journal bumps up your impact factor and helps you win more grant money. If high impact factor journals go out of business because of piracy, others will just take their place.
In short, pirates screwing over journals doesn't hurt researchers in the least. Shaking up the parasitic journal biz is actually long overdue. Journals put in only a tiny percentage of the labor involved in putting a paper through peer-review, but they soak everyone involved for massive amounts of time and money. It's time they died.
The reason they are not replaced is for the same reason, stocktrading places can not simply be "replaced"- aka you cant open up a competing wall-street.
Well... They mostly facilitate the evaluation of the goods. The evaluation itself is still done by scientists and scholars that are not employed by the publishers.
You cant just open another marketplace at the same location, because that has you at a automatic disadvantage. You could however ruin the marketplaces reputation, trying to shift customers to yours. You can also, wrap the market-place as in- provide a vital layer they need to function, and thus turn them into a organella of a bigger market-place.
Ahem.
More about the Impact Factor: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
More about why intelligent people "put up" with this: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
An overview of some hopeful initiatives by people who aren't putting up with this: https://medium.com/flockademic/these-trailblazers-are-paving...
1. You produce novel research.
2. You submit novel research to the best conference or workshop you think will publish it.
3. The editor (a volunteer) invites other researchers to volunteer their time to peer review your research.
4. Assuming your research bears up under scrutiny and the peer reviewers are not actually competitors who decide to reject (this supposedly happens, but is rare), your paper passes peer review.
5. Congratulations! The conference or workshop agrees to publish your novel research. For this, you generally must show up to the conference or workshop to present your work in person. This costs money (conference registration), and also travel cost and such. However, if you were going to the conference anyway, there is no added expenditure.
6. Having been paid by you to publish your work, ACM sells your paper at somewhat exorbitant prices to university libraries (unless you paid them lots extra to just make it available for free). However, at no cost to you, you are also explicitly allowed to post a "pre-print", identical to the published paper, on your personal/university website, where it will be promptly found by Google. However, the hosting is your own concern. (You can also upload the preprint to arXiv.)
It's a decent procedure. ACM also publishes journals, which do not require you to present anything in person. I do not know whether any author-borne costs are involved if you go that route.
This also allows me to timestamp my results - say my paper gets rejected because the reviewers think it's a bad fit for the conference, or they didn't understand my point because my writing was bad, etc. Now I have to improve it and submit it to another conference. If someone else publishes similar results in the meantime, then I can always point to the preprint and say that I did it first ;)
Yes! As an author of many CS conference papers, a few CS journal papers, and a few papers in other related fields, piracy affects me. It has been entirely beneficial, and I completely support sci-hub.
Collaborators, other authors, and other researchers have been able to read and find my work more cheaply and easily than they otherwise would have. Some would not have paid to buy my papers sight unseen. Some can't afford to buy them. A larger audience is always good for me.
I have also never directly earned even a single cent from any published work of mine. No royalties, no copyright payments, no publisher payments, etc. And I've paid thousands to publishers over the years to publish my own work.
We want and need to disseminate our results as much as possible and the paywalls are getting more and more in our way. You won't find many scientists who are against Sci-Hub - maybe a few at some unusually rich universities of some very rich countries that pay $500 for a color graphics and the $2500-$3000 fee per article for them that makes the publication "open access".
Poorer countries cannot afford the journal subscriptions either, because these can be exorbitantly high - so high, that even top universities have to limit access. I stumble almost daily over a journal to which my institute doesn't have access. Before the advent of Sci-Hub, we often had to ask colleagues abroad on mailing lists for (technically illegal!) copies of articles to be able to conduct our research.
1. Go to the university library in person. 2. Submit a order-and-copy request for that paper. 3. Return 2 days later unless there is a weekend in-between. 4. Print a non-searchable, non-zoomable (extremely annoying in CG where I work) copy because getting the PDF is forbidden due to legal issues.
Now combine this with the usual way to do related work research for your own paper: 1. Search relevant papers for your topic. 2. Check who else cited these paper and read those papers. 3. Complete this breadth-first-search until time runs out or the papers become too off-topic.
This (in my field) yields a stack of around 120 papers I would have to order that 2-day-print-copy for of which in turn 100 are most probably irrelevant and hence will not be part of my papers related work section. Note also that I would have to order each "layer" of the breadth-first search separately - each time taking 2 days. Compare that to a day of related work research with sci-hub.
Quite obviously I have never met a researcher who took the legal/official road ;)
As an academic, my main interest is that others are able to read my work. If piracy is how they obtain access, then that's fine by me.
For example, a PhD thesis might be the full written-up version of 3-4 conference papers you'd have published in the course of your PhD, and then you might condense the important part of your thesis into a single journal paper afterwards, but this is only a vague example and there are many ways of skinning this cat. There are many examples of extremely short conference papers that have had a major impact in their field, and there are _millions_ of completely forgettable journal papers.
The above broadly holds for any of the scientific research disciplines with which I'm familiar.
Publishing in such a journal does not cost money. It also doesn't pay the authors.
Only the readers pay for the journal subscription.
Then about 15 years ago, a movement started to invert this process. This is called Open Access. Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed, and it is published with a copyleft license, free to access by the public.
In the last years, traditional journals have started similar offerings, sometimes graduated (i. e. you pay only a little, and the article is embargoed for a year).
Sci-Hub is attacking this problem with technology. That is the second-best solution only. It would be much better if the scientific community could throw their weight behind legal Open Access publishing.
That's because there simply are costs involved in the review process, even if the reviewers as well as the authors are not paid. Copyediting, infrastructure, coordination, public relations, data retention, and other work that goes into publishing is done by full-time employees. As one point of reference: PLOS One, the largest Open Access publisher, charges around $600 for a publishing a manuscript. That's a non-profit, and it represents the best current effort to manage this process.
Note: it's not necessarily the case that the author pays. For example, the Open Library of Humanities [1] is funded by contributions my academic libraries, and is thus both free to read and to publish in. Something that's also referred to as Open Access (the "green" variant - I wrote about the different flavours at [2]) is when authors post a version of their article elsewhere, e.g. at their institution or on ArXiV.
The confusion is common though: there are lot of terms, and publishers have been exacerbating it by co-opting the terms (which I wrote about at [3]).
[2] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c...
[3] https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-w...
They had access to the Internet before the general public, they would have realized the ridiculousness of the journal model decades ago. You can't always be a victim.
I think it's because modern academia lacks the slack in the system that is necessary to solve these kinds of problems.
AAA (American Anthropological Association) sent out a reminder to its members recently. When someone publishes their own paper on ResearchGate or academia.edu, they are in violation of copyright (which they've signed over to the lovely scientific publisher). It's a mess.
https://savageminds.org/2017/10/23/takedown-notice-aaa/
Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.
The only royalty check I've ever seen from research I did is for a chapter of a book, and it was less than a dollar. Royalties don't matter.
In practice, people cite unread papers pretty often. In some cases, the paper they cite doesn't even exist. http://blog.codalism.com/index.php/citing-papers-that-youve-... gives an example of a non-existent paper which had been cited 215 times.
http://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/100771670031/seven-cita... gives some more examples of citations for papers which don't exist.
The top rated answer at https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/is-it-une... argues:
> When you cite a source, you are not actually claiming that you have read it. What you are actually doing is staking your professional reputation on that source containing the information that you claim that it contains.
I don't recall a paper ever being retracted because it cited a background paper which doesn't exist.
And to think that royalty is usually associated with crowns and gold and jewels and such ...
"I remember once, when the money baskey was empty, Dad told Mother that "a royalty was due." I hung around that day because I had never seen a king (I was eight) and when a visitor showed up I was disappointed because he didn't wear a crown. There was money in the basket the next day so I decided that he had been incognito (I was reading The Little Lame Prince) and had tossed Dad a purse of gold-it was at least a year before I found out that a "royalty" could be money from a patent or a book or business stock, and some of the glamour went out of life."
The vast majority of scientists never receive any of these prizes. A lot work in fields where no such prizes exists.
Its in just about everyone's interests for for-profit academic publishers to collapse. If Sci-Hub can help bring this about, it will be a historic victory for the open internet.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/why...
https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commerci...
How, and why, is such a business model still working? The only scenario I can think of is when an independent researcher wants to publish his/her research to disseminate to a wider audience and invite critiques. Or, is that also possible without these publishers?
I've been researching the industry for quite a while, and have written up the vicious cycle that keeps this in place in some more detail here: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
Each individual researcher wants their work published in as high-impact paper as possible. Individually fighting against the very publisher you want to publish your work with is harmful to your career and will accomplish exactly nothing.
It takes a critical mass of researchers, acting in coordinated way, for the attempt to change things not be suicidal.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf
I'm not really easily angered, but Elsevier (and, to a lesser extent, the other scientific publishers) are really despicable, earning above-market returns on equity off the labour of (publicly funded) scientists, then spending some of that money to make it harder to access the (publicly funded) research.
Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.
Read the longest section of the Wikipedia entry on Elsevier ("Criticism"), and weep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv...
1. Reputation. Journals are a provider, mainly, of a note saying "this paper is worth reading". This reputation is calculated largely by how much the papers they publish get cited later on. Due to the speed of iterations of science (how long it takes for a published paper to be used in more work, and then that new work to be published) it takes a long time to get past this.
2. Organised peer review. Despite the reviewers working for free, it's still not a free process. There's a great twitter thread about this from someone at peerJ (founder?) but I can't find a link now.
Getting more and more common is to pay the publisher and have the work made openly available, or at least to deposit the work in an institutional repository.
[disclaimer, I work in the science & publishing area for Digital Science, but on analysis of data not the publishing itself]
Publishers require expensive subscriptions from academic universities to be able to read their published papers.
So actually it goes the other way around. Academics have to pay to read papers, and to write papers.
Scihub does not steal a dime from any original contributor. They actually save money from them.
Authors in general get no money for publications. In a weird setup of today authors get benefits from publications of prestige, career, hiring help and other scientists get curation / peer review benefits.
If current publication system went away completely and quickly it would be a minor shock to the system, but IMO easy to survive as a replacement curation system would emerge (from conferences, arxiv style, etc.)
We are trying to fight this by making our own open source journals, but it will take decades to replace to old, well-established journals if it happens at all. Until then, if you don't publish in a sizable number of firewalled/copyrighted top journals, your career will end at the postdoc level.
However, the researchers (at least in STEM) often publish these "in-progress" drafts that are very close to the final articles on their website or wherever.