Elsevier threatens others for linking to Sci-Hub but does so itself
eve.gd
eve.gd
There’s some more information in this Twitter thread, I’m trying to keep it updated as this develops: https://twitter.com/citationsy/status/1156626811398307840
They know they could bankrupt me
without breaking a sweat.
They already started taking action but as I understand it, you are not bankrupt yet.
If you put the links back in place, what would they do next? And at which step would you be bankrupt?
As far as I know, being bankrupt means you owe someone more money then you have.
At what point does this situation occur?
I would think at first a court needs to accept the plaint and order him to write a rebuttal or to appear in front of the court or something? I wonder what exactly would happen.
I don't think "That’s how all major companies operate," but if it is, it should be easy for you to find an example of a class action lawsuit like this?
(I agree that harrasment lawsuits where it is very expensive to defend regardless of your chances of victory -- are how all companies with enough money to do it operate. Just without the class action component).
I took a small court case almost to trial, eventually settling out of court. My lawyers got over $100k.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-def...
> Now, reformers are using data in a novel attempt to create such a standard. The studies they have produced so far, in four states, say that public defenders have two to almost five times as many cases as they should.
> The bottom line: Mr. Talaska would have needed almost 10,000 hours, or five work-years, to handle the 194 active felony cases he had as of that April day, not to mention the dozens more he would be assigned that year. (The analysis did not include one death-penalty case on his roster, the most time-consuming type of case.)
Based on that summary, it seems like the position in most of the EU is probably much the same as the common law world (US/UK/CA/AU/NZ): you'll probably get legal aid if you're destitute and facing potential imprisonment, but you're unlikely to get legal aid to defend a copyright infringement case, especially if your net assets are non-zero and you can easily make the case go away by just removing some web links. That may mean that you are thereby deprived of your rights, if your legal argument is correct, but resource-starved legal aid bodies will prioritise cases that involve a smaller chance of someone being wrongfully convicted.
I think it moves us towards a clearer understanding of Academic Journal publication as peer review's 'stamp of approval', rather than the explanatory event per se. And this will make easier to move towards long-term, sustainable practices for publication and science.
DOI are horrible invention, they are prone to man in the middle attacks and dead links, please don't use them.
Even if you disallow JS entirely, and stick with just HTML/CSS, it has enough warts to not look and behave consistently over time.
How does pdf solve link rot problem? Pdf is good for print, it's consistant. But fails when display size other than big screen, especially e-ink displays that don't tend to be your standard A4.
Vanilla html with images embedded as data URNs should be pretty darn portable for the forseeable future.
Heres the kicker, it's a text based protocol, and a dead simple one, eben if we should loose all browsers in the big browser war of 2033, its super easy to reverse engineer. PDF not so much.
Arxiv already accepts latex and compiles it for you, we should expect the same from journals and ask them to publish the hash of the document they received.
The journals I published in all accepted latex. But they convert it to use their layouting software. The last correction steps are typically done only in this version, and the author has to backport them into their tex code. Why should the journal have any interest in making the arxiv version more attractive?
Science simply doesn't operate on journal published papers most of the time. The paper mills run so hot that you regularly cite preprints, that get exchanged between authors directly. It happens regularly that the proof is supposedly in the "full paper" only that the "full paper" was never published.
I dont think authors have incentive to abuse the system. Just upload the final proof of your manuscript to arxiv, click "final version" , and this lets people know that this is the same article as in the journal.
DOIs are ubiquitous and they would serve the purpose of redirecting to the free pdfs rather then the journal site. This can be applied to existing articles retroactively. Plus, many bibliography styles include the DOI which makes the reference easier to use
Individual entities register DOIs, and decide where they redirect (and can change the resolution at any time). In these cases, the publisher (such as Elsevier) is the one who has registered the DOI, and they get to decide where it redirects/resolves. They also paid for the DOIs.
There are actually a (small-ish) number of DOI registrars. The largest, and most likely by far to be used for scholarly articles, is CrossRef.
Neither CrossRef nor the DOI foundation have the authority to change where a DOI resolves to, against the wishes of the DOI registrant. (It would be like a DNS registrar or the IANA deciding news.ycombinator.com should resolve somewhere other than Y Combinator wants it to -- indeed DOI works pretty analogously to DNS, probably intentionally by inspiration).
What you propose would require major changes to the social and business setup of DOI. Probably to the business/sustainability model too, because a registrant would probably be less excited to pay for a DOI they don't actually get to control the resolution of. (CrossRef and the International DOI Foundation are both non-profits. They still need to pay for their operations, and the DOI infrastructure. That is currently funded by charging registrants for DOIs). It would also require some kind of "regulatory regime" to determine who has the authority on what basis to determine where a DOI resolves (and those 'regulators' would probably increase expenses, which you need a new plan for funding), compared to the current situation where whatever entity registered a DOI decides where it resolves to (similar to DNS).
The actual hosting of the PDFs (and TeX, and hopefully even the raw data) is something that universities or whomever the researchers are working for could host cheaply and easily. When I was attending UC Davis in the late 90s, the university hosted a huge archive that not only included their own publications, it also mirrored the publications of the other UCs and many important public archives like kernel.org.
Compared to huge archives of Linux distros and pre-GIT source code histories, hosting a bunch of PDF/TeX is effectively free. Reliable curation that saves a lot of people from wasting their own time and effort trying to find useful/interesting papers is extremely valuable.
1. How did publishers like Elsevier get started?
2. Was their value proposition true back in the day? How did it change over time?
3. How did the industry evolve?
3b. What are the barriers to entry and how did those evolve?
3c. What was the business model then and what is it now? Who are the clients (universities, I presume)? How do they pay for this (taxpayer money? If so, that's a huge clue). Who is the decision-maker regarding these purchases?
4. How is it possible that they still exist? If they don't provide value anymore, then what is it? Are people habitual creatures? Are they pressuring universities? Did they somehow get a vendor lock-in effect (can people get out)?
I'm simply trying to get why it became what it became and why it isn't dying in the slightest despite researchers trying to organize themselves a bit for open access.
When I see an article punished in an Elsevier journal, it gives me a sign it is trustworthy. When I'm asked to submit something to an Elsevier journal, it gives me confidence the journal is trustworthy.
I, as I guess someone with an academic email address, give dozens of invitations to read, submit to, and help edit, journals every week. I have no choice other than to send the majority of these directly to trash.
Slowly, open source trustworthy journals are appearing, but they need to gain trust and that takes time. We need something like a Web of trust for academic work, but it would be a major undertaking to set up.
Also, who is going to pay for all the work of setting up and running these new journals? And don't assume there are zero costs, just because academics do tend to work for free.
You might want to reconsider that.
https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/elsevier-publishe...
"Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.0029...
I like the Freudian slip in "punished"!
Someone had a lot of money and knew many academics in a few fields. They asked some to review papers and others to send them papers.
> 2. Was their value proposition true back in the day? How did it change over time?
They derived value from peer review, prestige, and collecting all pieces.
Peer review is important for any journal to supply and is a useful step to put your own work through to make sure you are accurately conveying your ideas.
Prestige gets you funding and degrees. Some colleges don't let you get a master's or PhD if you don't have N publications from a X impact factor journal.
Before the internet your college library was your source of information. The librarian has many things to do (not now, we are talking pre-internet) and rather than find every single individual in a field and poll then for papers they go to a publisher and ask for a copy of all of the publications the journal gets.
> 3. How did the industry evolve?
Depending on the field not much to very much.
> 3b. What are the barriers to entry and how did those evolve?
Now that the internet is a thing collecting, indexing, and distributing data is "free". The barriers to entry are still prestige and peer review.
> 3c. What was the business model then and what is it now? Who are the clients (universities, I presume)? How do they pay for this (taxpayer money? If so, that's a huge clue). Who is the decision-maker regarding these purchases?
The business model is two steps. Librarians: you pay me an obscene amount of money each year and I'll organize a bunch of relevant papers for you. Researcher: we only accept "the best" so if you get to publish in my journal you are "the best".
Purchasing subscriptions to these journals is likely still done by a librarian but i say "done" for a reason. There is no decision. You must have these journal subscriptions. More info below.
> 4. How is it possible that they still exist? If they don't provide value anymore, then what is it? Are people habitual creatures? Are they pressuring universities? Did they somehow get a vendor lock-in effect (can people get out)?
The lock-in is that, while they suck, researchers will only hire people with a specific number of publications in a specific impact factor journal. These journals are usually evil but it's "the one I read" so to get in front of some very important people you need to have published in some of these places. If you do the same quality work and publish it in a smaller, open access, journal that is great but it won't necessarily move your career as forward as publishing it in an important journal will.
The internet should have changed this model, but the publishers had amassed a secondary form of value - prestige. Scientists don't only want to share their research with their peers, but share that research in a prestigious publication. Getting a paper published in Nature or the BMJ has a meaningful impact on the author's career.
The internet makes it trivial to distribute documents for free, but nobody thus far has found an adequate substitute for the prestige of a highly respected journal. Universities keep paying to subscribe to prestigious journals because they publish some of the most interesting and significant research; academics keep sending their best work to the most prestigious journals because it's valuable to their career prospects.
This problem can probably only be solved through coordinated action by academics.
While I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, I have to take some exception to this. Yes it is trivial to put something online. But library sciences exist for a reason, so if you want a nice collection of things online with some sensible structure it becomes less trivial. Worse yet if you want some way of ranking in importance the things in your collection, it requires a lot of manual intervention.
I think your solution is ultimately correct, but the peer review process is harder to solve than the technical one, and there is still a cost of some sort to implement and maintain the technical one.
Not publishers.
Libraries.
All academic publishers contribute to the process is an early-2000s web interface.
Specifically, what structure do paid journals have that Arxiv lacks? How much would it cost to provide that structure outside of the current system, bearing in mind that editors and peer reviewers aren't paid a dime by the publishers?
The peer reviewers may not be paid but the prestigious academic journals (Nature, Cardiology, etc) do have paid editorial staff. E.g. the initial rejections of papers and rounds of back-&-forth copy-editing with the author are handled by the paid editors and not the unpaid peer reviewers.
That's not to say there are also journals that are run by 100% unpaid volunteers but I'm unaware of any particular Elsevier journals with that labor structure.
(However, this is not an endorsement of Elsevier's high subscription fees.)
Publishers do not currently do this. Their websites are a confusing jumble with difficult navigation, poor search features, no useful discovery features, ...
The “nice collection” with “sensible structure” is provided by external citation indexes like Google Scholar.
Science and technology progress on correctness, accuracy, and efficacy, not popularity.
It turns out that gatekeeping, cabal-fostering, orthodoxy-preserving, and kingmaking are lucrative practices. But truth cares not for prestige. As the motto of the Royal Socity states: In nullis verba. By the word of no one. Evidence, not authority.
(The situation may be different in some of the arts and letters. Which speaks to another can of worms.)
To try to bring an analogy, D. Knuths recent comment on the recent sensitivity proof has brought the discussion of the topic on a different level because it has basically been stamped with the approval of a highly prestigious scientist.
So although the sensitivity proof is a mathematical proof, the recent buzz around it has rocketed it to another level. This brings about real rewards in the form of promotions and invitations to exclusive social circles, all of which are desirable to humans.
To be slightly cynical, the majority of research output is not worth your time to read, so mechanisms that presort (E.g. by author list, keywords, and journal name) help to increase the chance you read a paper worth your time.
Is prestige very much baked into the practice, profession, career, and culture of academia? Yes. Has it largely always been thus? To the origins of the modern university, if not before -- arguably.
But that's not a necessary role, certainly not for publishing to play, and though giving a thought to side effects and consequences, disrupting the publication cycle might solve a few more problems then it creates.
Or not.
The deeper problem is that demonstrations of correctness don't adhere to publishing, funding, teaching, or even career cycles. Things can be thought wrong for a very long time and proved right, or vice versa. And again, all the prestige in the world won't change the truth value.
Though it will change what truths, or myths, are socialised at any given point in time.
However, I do think it is getting better, and a growing number of scientists (particularly the younger generations) are pushing back.
We've seen the same process in the pharmaceutical and newspaper industries, and likely others.
2. The value proposition was that they were the only way to publish research. Libraries subscribed to them (or bought issues), and reading journals in a library was the major way academics learned of new research in their field, unless they learned of the research in a conference.
3. The Internet.
3b. The barriers to entry used to be needing to have access to a publishing house capable of duplicating issues, and having your journal be in major libraries (which is usually related to being related to a major academic or a academic society).
The barrier to entry today is due to papers published being a major benchmark using which the productivity of an academic is measured. Older, well-known journals that accept only a few papers are known as having a larger "impact-factor", which means that publishing in them is worth more to an academic.
3c. The business model is always selling subscriptions to libraries, mostly university libraries (but also regular ones and research outfits in industry). Once they don't actually print anything their costs are mostly administrative, so they're basically printing money. The decision maker are librarians, usually, but they get set a budget by whoever owns the library.
4. Because they own the major benchmark used to evaluate an academic career. If you are an academic and want to further your career (i.e., get a job, get tenure, get a grant), you have to publish in one of those journals. If you're another academic and you then want to read that research, you then have to have your library subscribed to that journal (or look it up and Sci-Hub).
The main criticism I read about Elsevier is that universities can’t subscribe to just the most important Elsevier publications but have to subscribe to a big package while the content producers aren’t paid by Elsevier but work at the universities. This only works, because Elsevier is a monopoly and this is the reason why science hub is a thing.
Was this ever actually the case? Researchers have always published on their own in one way or another. What these journals added was an established peer review mechanism.
Because the academics who publish in those journals get jobs at prestigious universities, every university needs to keep those journals in those libraries, because that's where all the highest profile researchers are publishing their articles. Anyone who wants to join that group also needs to compete to publish in those journals. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
2. Over time, their journals' proposition evolved to be less "distributor of print" and more "curator of the most respected content". As universities started scrutinising how good their academics were at getting articles published and journals they published in started being ranked by "impact factor", the value proposition of curated content got stronger
3. Computers made it relatively easy for academics to produce print-ready articles themselves. The internet made it straightforward for academics to distribute articles as neatly formatted PDFs and share their early drafts with peers for review without involving any publisher. But also, academics and students started expecting to be able to search through decades of articles online rather than hunt for a single paper copy of each on in library, which opened up a nice little opportunity to sell renewable subscriptions for digital access to the archives.
3b. The barriers to entry used to be not having the facility to print and distribute and sell to libraries as well as the fact your new journal isn't Nature. Now it's just the latter. And also the fact you're simply not allowed to republish the decades worth of content they own, which includes a lot of must-cite texts
3c. The business model was getting academics to submit and review content for free which was then resold to universities staffed by people who expected [their students] to be able to read it as part of their research and expected the library to pick up the tab. Still is, just publishing new content is easier for everybody, and since the journal sub offers digital access to the archives and not just 12 bits of paper for the library they can ask for more eye-watering sums of money.
4. Regardless of whether open access journals ultimately inherit the prestige of the existing ones, academic publishers will continue own the copyright of decades worth of texts which academics and students are expected to have read to properly understand their field, and so university libraries will continue to be expected to subscribe to them. The lockin effect is that you can't do serious academic research without reading papers which they own. Which is also why they're not very keen on people pirating their content.
I think people are answering this question as if it were about scientific publishers in general. They were just respected magazines, often published by scientific membership societies.
Elsevier specifically was a publisher that just gobbled as many of them that it could up until it got to a monopoly or near-monopoly position by specialization (meaning that it could own every important journal is some professions, and most of them in others.) Then it jacked up the prices infinitely, and their competitors took the signal and jacked up their prices too. Now, some major universities are defecting, which is actually a signal that the pricing is just about perfect for the market.
It's just the same old boring operations of capitalism. This is exactly how pharma, or the music business works.
"Peer review" is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away?
https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2017/09/peer-review-is...
Peer review : the end of an error?
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-end-of-an-erro...
Peer review: Troubled from the start
https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-st...
Why the National Institutes of Health Should Replace Peer Review With a Lottery — Pacific Standard
https://psmag.com/news/why-the-national-institutes-of-health...
It 's a chicken and egg problem: Authors don't publish to new journals because they are not reputable yet and journals can't become reputable because authors don't publish to them. I don't know the theory of chicken and egg problems but i think they are solved when either a) a brand new discipline emerges therefore the first bidders win by default or b) some extraordinary action is taken
You wouldn't link to your friend's mailbox if it was your friend who sent you a copy of the article; why would you link to scihub for basically the same?
And the sci-hub link does not work while the original does!
Example from article:
http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.org/science/article/pii...
vs
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014070070...
Clearly it was not meant to. Especially if you look at reference 4 here [1], it looks like the internal format of whatever reference database the authors used, was accidentally leaked into to references. Probably missing commas somewhere.
HYPERLINK “http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11661-007-9094-9”\t“_blank”
https://getpolarized.io/2019/01/23/mendeleys-encrypted-repos...
No. The ethics of sci-hub are not problematic. The ethics of Elsevier and their gang certainly are.
Those businesses have better things to do than piss off their customers and authors as they try to police the internet.
Even more cynically (and predicted by Max Headroom ~35 years ago) academic work has more potential to unlock economic value for the unwashed masses, so it needs to be better policed.
Scihub is completely different from Libgen in terms of ethics. No academic has ever written a manuscript for publication in a peer-reviewed journal because they were going to get paid for it. There is nothing whatsoever ethically problematic in accessing Elsevier's content on Scihub. Those journal articles should be free to the world, not least because the reasearch is often paid for by public funds.
Do not confuse what I'm saying. I am not saying that I think Libgen is a bad thing. I am saying it is a difficult area from a moral/ethical/economic point of view. Scihub and Libgen are the most fantastic libraries the world has ever known. Literally. It seems pretty clear that making them available to someone in rural Angola is a good thing to do. I work in a highly developed country and it's slightly less clear that the anarchy should extend to benefit me, but honestly I'm happy that it does.
Just to add my 0.02$ as a soon-to-be-phd-dropout, I once downloaded my own paper from SciHub after I lost the stupid PDF and of course the publisher wouldn't let me get it for free. If anyone plans to assemble a torch and pitchfork mob, by all means let me know.
The sentiment behind the downvotes might be something like, "The first rule of libgen is you don't talk about libgen."
If I ran HN, I'd require a brief comment to be associated with each downvote, but then I'd do a lot of stuff differently.
Though sometimes different faculties in same campus have their own absurd formatting rules...
I think it's ethics are spot on. it's legality on the other hand...
Seems like enough universities could make a really good case for it.
I would like to add separately however for people unfamiliar with sci-hub, I am unaware of any copyright infringement issues of linking to or downloading from sci-hub. Sharing or downloading links has never been copyright infringement. Distribution is, which is why sci-hub is based in a separate jurisdiction (Russia I believe) that does not recognize US copyright claims.