Comment by Athas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Athas | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not all fields suffer from this to the same degree. For example, I am a fledgling computing scientist. I mostly publish in ACM-related conferences and workshops, where ACM is an organisation run by and for academics and professionals in the computing field, not a for-profit publisher. My submission experience is:

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.

To be clear to everyone else, the parent and the grandparent have just described respectively conference papers and journal papers. Journal papers are usually a bit longer and represent more work, conference papers are usually shorter and take a bit less time. This of course is a generalization.

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.

So does the piracy affect you? Are you in favor of sites like sci-hub?

I'm in a very similar position as the OP (Computer Science PhD student). Piracy doesn't affect me at all. I'm very happy if someone wants to read my papers, however, you don't have to use sci-hub etc to access them - I've published preprints of all of them on arxiv.org. Usually I do this right after I submit to a conference and update it later to reflect any changes made before publication.

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 ;)

Nice approach!!!

(not parent)

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.

As a scientist, I am unambiguously in favor of Sci-Hub and similar sites.

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.

I might add the actual legal way at our university in case anyone wonders. The official way to get paywalled papers we do not have bulk-orders for is this:

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 ;)

Piracy makes it easier for me to obtain papers that are otherwise behind paywalls, for example because I am at home.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com