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>she enables the lay public to read and interpret science rather than awaiting the interpretation and approval of academics from high-status institutions

>science becomes accessible to everyone with basic scientific literacy

The thing is most research papers are simply not accessible to neophytes; you often need to dedicate a significant portion of your life to the study of a given field in order to understand and critically evaluate the latest research in that field. It's not that academics are sitting in a high throne, dictating what is truth and what is not, its that you need to be an academic with many years of formation in order to understand, let alone improve, the research that is being undertaken. A "basic science literacy" isn't enough.

Still, it's very positive that, in principle, anyone can grab a book or three of libgen, study hard, become knowledgeable in the field, then grab as many papers as they want off libgen and read and interpret them. That's undoubtedly very positive.

>> The thing is most research papers are simply not accessible to neophytes

To most neophytes that is. We only need a few of those with recently gained access to turn out to be a dormant Newton or Einstein. Society as a whole gets a better bargain.

Indeed! And the more neophytes that take the plunge and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, the more neophytes there will be to encourage and enable other neophytes to do the same (network effects and whatnot).

I agree with your sentiment 100%, but "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" is a phrase that came into existence to MOCK the idea that you can do it all on your own. It's obviously absurd, until it got so common that we use it without thinking. If you need a fresh quip to get the point try: "that poor mother can get by drinking her own milk!"

>The thing is most research papers are simply not accessible to neophytes

That very much depends on how you define "neophyte" and what field you're talking about. You don't need to be a doctor to make sense of most clinical trials, you just need a reasonable education in statistics. A mechanical engineer can usefully learn from a lot of materials science or fluid dynamics research. Our society is increasingly well-educated, which creates a huge number of people who can make use of sci-hub in one way or another.

If you're writing papers that are of no use whatsoever to anyone outside of a tiny coterie of specialists in your field, then either you're doing absolutely cutting-edge theoretical work or you're just really bad at writing papers.

That is a good point, but it's also true that you don't know what you don't know.

I've learned a lot about things I never thought I would be interested in by searching for terms and maths that I saw in papers and didn't understand.

It's not like I've become an expert in anything new, but it gets me thinking about all kinds of interesting things. It makes me want to go back to school, and reinforces the idea that I could create more if I did.

So I know that not everyone sees it this way, but I think that gating the means to easily access that sort of aspirational hope and inspiration is reprehensible.

The argument that people should be prevented from reading information that they may not understand bugs me..

> The thing is most research papers are simply not accessible to neophytes

The other thing is that it's not just neophytes without access. Heck, even in-academia researchers often have insufficient access (I recently spoke to someone at Nancy, France, which is wealthy enough), let alone the droves of former academics.

I would argue that most people who studied an empirical discipline in college and did ok (good school and/or good grades) can pick up a paper and, using the internet, understand and critique it creatively within three weeks. The basic idea of science (minus a little nuance) is "I'll believe it when I see it, and I can show that it can't be explained otherwise." This isn't too much to think about.

If a paper doesn't link back to its foundations directly (citations) and clarify its assumptions, that isn't the fault of the reader.

One really dumb thing that many academics do is, in an effort to be respected in their field or accepted to a solid paper or a good conference, they write obscurely. With very few exceptions, this results in bad science writing because the point of science writing is to express clearly and precisely the steps and formulations that lead to an ideological or project accomplishment. But that bad writing doesn't make the paper less intelligible for normal people. It simply makes it take longer to read, for a typical person.

One of the reasons it's easier to understand research than to do it, is that it's easier to verify a solution than to create it. This is the famous Columbus' Egg, and it is a principle that should be well known to computer scientists who understand the time complexity of verification versus solution.

So, I argue that basic science literacy is enough to understand and critique. Verification of an idea is different than creating it. Papers that don't reference how they fit into their field are flawed in a way that can't be blamed on the reader. Obscure, bad writing doesn't change the meaning of a paper, even if it hides it. And the basic tool of science is a pretty accessible idea.

Would you care to put that argument to a test?

Because it appear to me that papers like (picking one from the front page of cell.com) http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(18)30... "A Metabolic Basis for Endothelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition" require a lot of specialized knowledge to understand.

The same for https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02935 "Suppression and revival of long-range ferromagnetic order in the multiorbital Fermi-Hubbard model", picked from a recent arxiv.org preprint in condensed matter physics.

Or "High-Content Surface and Total Expression siRNA Kinase Library Screen with VX-809 Treatment Reveals Kinase Targets that Enhance F508del-CFTR Rescue" from https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.7b00928 .

What does "critique it creatively" mean?

I remember how long it took me, as a young smithling in graduate school, to read a scientific paper, in the field I was entering, where I had several years of education. It took a while to understand the literature, and even longer to be able to critique the literature in any more than superficial way.

I don't follow your comment "If a paper doesn't link back to its foundations directly". Papers are often like a skyscraper. The 50th floor links back to the 49th, which links back to the 48th. There are support structures which might span a few dozen floors, and (to stretch the analogy), express elevators connecting it to the ground floor.

But few papers really reference the foundations, because the audience is expected to know the foundations.

> What does "critique it creatively" mean?

I assume it means to critique it using modern interpretive dance.

I've seen it done. http://gonzolabs.org/dance/ . E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRLoP3gOUM4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMTAc8PEDTU ,

Are these characteristic papers, or the densest ones you could find? I submit that the vast majority of papers can be understood by people who have had about 4 years of university, and another 3-4 years of post-graduate education. Do you really believe that cobbling some portion of this study together over a lifetime is not even possible, or maybe even something that would be increasingly common, with access to the literature?

People have endless time to become experts on quackery and pop science; wouldn't it be nice to start seeing people who have taken up actual science as a hobby, and take it seriously enough to hold themselves to the same standards as professionals - or as seriously as the 20-somethings that are often writing these things?

Also, plenty of people get professional training, and end up working outside of the field. What if they want to continue learning? Is it somehow physically impossible for them to understand journal articles if they are not connected to an institution with journal subscriptions, even with training?

They were not the densest ones I could find. Not by far. I'm surprised you even thought of it. How many science articles not in your field have you read?

Take a look at the other articles in the current issue of Cell, at http://www.cell.com/cell/current . (This is one of the journals with the highest impact factors, so is less likely to consider the deliberately opaque language you mention.) You'll see the one I gave was not even the densest in that issue. Here are the titles to some of the others:

"Fast-Spiking Interneurons Supply Feedforward Control of Bursting, Calcium, and Plasticity for Efficient Learning", "In Situ Structure of Neuronal C9orf72 Poly-GA Aggregates Reveals Proteasome Recruitment", "5-HT2C Receptor Structures Reveal the Structural Basis of GPCR Polypharmacology", "Abstract Image Multiscale Structuring of the E. coli Chromosome by Nucleoid-Associated and Condensin Proteins", or "KRAS Dimerization Impacts MEK Inhibitor Sensitivity and Oncogenic Activity of Mutant KRAS".

I submit that your original statement, that "most people who studied an empirical discipline in college and did ok (good school and/or good grades) can pick up a paper and, using the internet, understand and critique it creatively within three weeks." is woefully undervaluing the expertise needed for each field.

I have 3 years of post-graduate education in physics. I can't read a chemistry paper for the life of me. I never even took organic chemistry. I find the idea that I can critique a paper on, say, some new reaction, with only a few weeks of internet-based research, to be ludicrous.

I note that you appear to have changed your statement. Originally it was just college, and now it's "another 3-4 years of post-graduate education." Originally it was "creatively within three weeks" and now it's "understand journal articles" with no time limit.

It feels like you think my objection to your original claim is representative of some absolute stance of mine against amateurism. As an amateur historian, I do not see how you have made that shift, nor do hold that opinion.

I don't understand the relevancy of your second paragraph at all. People get into quackery and pop science because it seems easy, and it comes with the built-in belief that experts are wrong and can be ignored.

If anything, it is the quacks and fringe science people who believe that three weeks of research is enough for them to be able to critique the standard views on evolution, global warming, chemtrails, pyramid construction, shape of the earth, etc., and critique to such a level that they should be listened to.

Nor do I understand the relevancy of your third paragraph. Could you clarify how you drew that inference from what I wrote? I am not connected to an institution with journal subscriptions yet I read and understand journal articles (acquired through ILL, links from Google Scholar, and yes, even Sci-Hub), so obviously I think it's physically possible for that to happen.

Are you sure you haven't just misunderstood my previous comment?

You aren't wrong, but I am not sure where you are going with this?

I was expressing a disagreement with the argument originaly made by totalZero and expanded upon by pessimizer.

I'm pretty much going where most HN comment threads go - nowhere.

Where are you going by making a metacomment?

I suggest a key component of being able to "critique it creatively" is understanding the paper in the context of other work in the immediate sub-discipline, and the wider discipline.

I suspect there are insufficient focused waking hours in a three week period for any old university graduate to achieve that.

If I branch out into a nearby sub-discipline I end up spending a lot of time reading a lot of papers just to get sufficient context to make sense of a single paper, and that is starting from a base of knowledge of the broader discipline accumulated by someone several years post-PhD.

Even for practicing scientists, non-superficial critique of anything outside of ones immediate area of expertise takes work.

To work efficiently in your own sub-discipline, you have to be at the point where you can see references to Smith & Jones (1992) and implicitly know what that paper is about, and why it is referenced. That takes experience (you have to have read a lot of papers so you are already familiar with a reasonable portion of the references in a given paper) and you have to be practicing, (or at least I have to), otherwise you start to forget.

It's not just about laymen. There are quite a few PhD-holders working outside academia. Many of them cannot even access their own papers without paying ridiculous fees.

And even within academia. Big universities can afford to subscribe to thousands of journals; small universities and research institutes can't. When I worked at a research institute I would routinely encounter paywalls trying to access papers.

Even within; between funding sources or position switches, you might lose access to your institution's library, or your institution might be small with significant gaps in their subscriptions.

Ultimately, Sci-hub is often an easier and more pleasant way to get papers you have legitimate access to. At this point, I don't think there's anyone in my department that doesn't use Sci-hub from time to time. It's basically expected that anyone on filing fees for dissertation writing will use sci-hub rather than go through the hassle of requesting a special library access code (since they're no longer 'paying/earning' tuition).

There's no going back.

"Basic scientific literacy" is not enough to read most papers (in part because most papers are badly written and need familiarity with the genre to be understood). Almost everyone that I know that uses sci-hub does so because it's faster than finding the correct institutional proxy, repository, login credentials, etc. that they would need otherwise (the sci-hub UX is vastly superior).

The ability of a non-scientist to understand a paper at a useful level varies greatly based on the area of study and the reader's knowledge of the topic. 'Basic scientific literacy' may not be enough, but there are many more individuals with an amateur level of advanced understanding or interest in a given area who benefit greatly. I personally have no institutional access but I read a lot of papers that I can understand with an undergrad level of science background and a keen interest in a specific subject. I'm sure there are many others like this.

And let us not forget those who ended up working in wildly different fields from their degree or degrees. Such "cross-pollination" between different fields can be very productive.

"Basic scientific Literacy" here probably should include basic understanding of statistics, and knowledge on how to read a journal paper in a foreign scientific domain. You don't have to know the lay of the land in a particular domain to understand the specific claim or methodology outlined, knowing how much it may mean in a domain. . . well that is context determined.

> (in part because most papers are badly written and need familiarity with the genre to be understood)

Considering science is a community/social enterprise, it's surprising that such papers are published at all.

> To me, Alexandra Elbakyan is kind of like a Martin Luther of science. That is, she enables the lay public to read and interpret science rather than awaiting the interpretation and approval of academics from high-status institutions.

I don't think the analogy works. Luthor took a single text and translated it, making it accessible. The fact that it was accessible didn't affect the creation of the text.

By contrast "the interpretation and approval of academics from high-status institutions." is an intrinsic part of the creation of the document. It's part of the peer-review essential to the creation of good science.

Experts disagreeing on the fundamental nature of the holy trinity is not the same as experts disagreeing on the experimental design behind testing a new category of drugs.

Still - I think the analogy is suiting. Martin Luther started a movement which granted common people access to religious texts (by translating them from Latin). Sci-Hub removes other obstacles to access knowledge, but the goal is somewhat similar.

This is not to say that peer review and expert validation doesn't have it's place in the process - but it could (should) be done in open, with as many eyes watching as possible. So IMHO anything that denies general public access to scientific work should be removed.

I agree. This is clearly how science should be done for the benefit of humanity. Closed access journals are the "property is theft" of scholarship. Being able to read papers and engage directly with the material is how innovation will happen. If not SciHub then someone else. It was and is just too important of a service not to be the new status quou.

Completely agree. Science is not a published paper about an experiment. It is a community activity, the results of which only improve with increased participation and experimental replication. Anything enabling a greater number of people to participate makes science more science-y.

Why not create an alternative platform where papers can be published for free, by the authors, instead of stealing them and publishing them like warez?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16341265 - basically, many top-tier journals won't accept papers that are also published in open access journals.

> Martin Luther of science

Martin Luther was an anti-semite and called for synagogues to be set on fire. Not a good comparison.

We scientists WANT (desperately want!) anyone and everyone, experts and neophytes alike, to read and pay attention to our work! The unavailability of scientific research papers is in no way due to snooty scientists restricting the availability of papers to others in the ivory tower. This is on the publishers, who charge massive rent-seeking mark-ups for actually doing very little work and providing very little value in this digital age. It is also on the system of sticks and carrots that prevents many scientists (notably those who do not yet have tenure) from publishing in free and open journals by tying our livelihood to publication in more traditional (non-free, non-open) journals that have high Impact Factors.