The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
blogs.lse.ac.uk
blogs.lse.ac.uk
Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced very strange 'reformatting' queries; my highlight being a journal that forces you to convert your lovingly-crafted vector graphs into JPG just 'because'.
On top of all that, add the fact that the interface of many publishers is egregiously bad to use. It takes a lot of clicks to download a single PDF, often opening multiple windows for that purpose or redirecting you a few times. Sci-Hub streamlined this process: you put in a DOI, and you get a PDF. Not an ePDF that is super laggy (looking at you, Wiley!), but a normal PDF that I can download, annotate, print, decorate my wall with.
Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity.
And editorship is highly variable, even at the highest end. I remember catching an article in Nature where two curves in separate panes were clearly copy-pasted yet claimed to be different conditions in the legend.
I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws.
Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works.
It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels.
Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks.
Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.
Depends on the country. In some places downloading is legal, only uploading is illegal. Also, the disk-based fee you mention does allow you to give away copies to friends and family for free in some countries.
The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or book?) but that’s the letter of the law.
Of course it’s at the same time illegal to break DRM so you are entitled to rip DVDs /bluray to your computer for convenience but it’s illegal to do it with most disc because you would need to break the DRM.
So, the tax officially doesn’t aim at compensating piracy. It’s a legal technicality because yes, the initial spirit was to levy a tax on illegal copying, but without encouraging it (“I already paid!”) or creating a global licence.
Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't acknowledge your right for physical safety and private property protection.
Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators.
Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get.
As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is.
In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law.
For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R
that is exactly what brought me back to piracy. I am not a heavy downloader, and I would welcome a legal way of accessing films paying a reasonable fee. I thought Netflix had (partially) fixed it, but I happen to live abroad and I can't access films in my native language. Not even subtitles, and sometimes not even in English. This is so stupid and frustrating, and it's entirely the fault of the film industry. Torrents here I come.
In theory this would be a major win for the content creator. 100% revenue going directly to them with no overhead for distribution, infinitely scalable (to stress: _in theory_, I am aware that this would play out differently in practice).
As for efficiency (no overhead for distribution etc) I don't really understand why do companies waste resources on technical measures of copyright protection in the first place. Almost every program which is even slightly popular has a crack/keygen anyway, almost every movie is ripped anyway, business users (pirating is more dangerous for them + they often need support) pay anyway (even if the activation form would accept any random string for serial), most of the users who download pirate copies would not buy a legal one (usually because it's hard for them to afford it) anyway (and that's how software like MS Windows and Office monopolize markets in developing countries where everybody just uses a pirate copy). So why to invest so much resources in DRMs, activation, genuine disks etc?
It's not about making sure its never cracked, it's about delaying the crack long enough to make money. Most video games and home movies make the majority of their profits in the weeks to months of release.
There are plenty of people who aren't opposed to paying for software, but they don't have any issues with using a cracked copy either. They just want to play the latest game in their favorite series as quickly and easily as possible. If you can delay the release of pirated copies and make using them inconvenient to use these people are more likely to buy a legit copy.
The fucked up part is that these fees still exist today when it is generally not possible to easily create private copies due to DRM. I can only assume that politicians who signed of and keep supporting on these laws are either bribed or brain dead.
E.g. CopySwede(https://www.copyswede.se/in-english/undersida-in-english/the...) is the Swedish lobbying organization which collects and lobbies for the fees in Sweden.
Are you really fulfilling your duty if you just buy content with a poor user experience without letting those who you pay know how bad it is? Would they know or have any incentive to fix the system if everybody bought things and still pirated them?
Here people BUY pirated stuff, sometimes more expensive than the original.
The reason is convenience and good service.
When you buy pirated software and games from the street dealer, you get:
often, better support than the publisher (specially for popular software, you ask him what is bothering you, he probably memorized the solution and tells you, while publisher support often is completely null, Google-style)
easier to install (custom installers are popular in pirated stuff).
sometimes have better patches, for example games with custom patches to run in older versions of Windows, or that fix popular issues (like Dark Souls at launch had tons of problems on PC, pirated versions fixed it, or Final Fantasy XV, the pirated version runs faster than the legitimate one, some people speculate that is because Denuvo, or because the lack of Denuvo allowed better optimization settings during compile time).
Translated to portuguese.
Has manual! Yes, sometimes the original software is lacking manual, while because during ancient times pirated software had no printed manual, people would add short manuals as a read-me file, some pirates still do that, even for software that has no manual at all.
Regarding games, Valve realized all that and Steam helped a lot, but before Steam it was common here to people buy even stuff that was free (many piracy dealers sold linux distros and other FOSS stuff) because of the convenience.
EDIT: forgot a big one... pirated stuff you can pay for it.
Yes... as weird it sounds, sometimes people wanted to buy a something, but it wasn't available here, often due to a stupid combination of region restrictions + exclusive publishing deals, since we are in South America, sometimes stuff would get into a legal limbo, whoever had "America" rights would focus in publishing in the US, and would block whoever had Europe or JP rights from publishing here.
This sadly is still common, specially with books, Barnes & Noble is a company that greatly aggravated me on that, I bought, legally, a lot of books that were only available in my country on the store "Fictionwise", BN bought them and demand me to be physically in USA to download the books I bought...
Or Electronic Arts, that only allowed officially USA players on Ultima Online, leading to a vibrant pirated server community in Brazil, since you couldn't play legally here.
Back when broadband was uncommon there were shops where you could just order anything that could be found on the Internet and they would burn a CD-R for you. They would keep the most popular files cached locally, and for the really popular stuff they would have pre-burned CDs in small kits with a xeroxed manual and maybe a colored cover and the like. Support was a big thing too, and community: it was a place where people would hang out a bit and talk to other people, share recommendations, meet people who could fix equipment, etc.
So if you ordered a Linux distro they would prepare it for you just like any software, VCD, disk full of MP3s, etc. I know of people who were introduced to Linux via these shops.
There used to be an earlier version of this sort of shop where you could bring floppy disks and they would copy them for you. As far as I know all of this has just about disappeared. Piracy exists but it is nowhere near as popular as it used to be.
What those shops basically sold was bandwidth: it was a physical version of pirate BBSs and w4r3z websites, from a time when phone and Internet access was harder to have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFS3p0emftw - "Security awareness: Filmmaker explores RAT malware, buys access to random PCs for just 15 cents a piece - made short film about his experience"
Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.
I also don't have a daughter, but I am Brazilian. Just adding a data point.
"What is a RAT (remote access Trojan)?
A remote access Trojan (RAT) is a malware program that includes a back door for administrative control over the target computer. RATs are usually downloaded invisibly with a user-requested program -- such as a game -- or sent as an email attachment. Once the host system is compromised, the intruder may use it to distribute RATs to other vulnerable computers and establish a botnet.
Because a RAT enables administrative control, it makes it possible for the intruder to do just about anything on the targeted computer, including:
- Deleting, downloading or altering files and file systems.
- Monitoring user behavior through keyloggers or other spyware.
- Accessing confidential information, such as credit card and social security numbers.
- Taking screenshots.
- Distributing viruses and other malware.
- Formatting drives."
Source: https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/RAT-remote-...
The video is unpirated in The Netherlands (VPRO is Dutch too).
For some reason they blocked it in the Netherlands. But if you're trying to watch it from outside of the Netherlands, it works great. I tried with a VPN.
Which is why you shouldn't believe everything you read.
By the way, this last sentence:
>Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.
Is entirely wrong. If you're worried about malware, you already know that it can come via video files as well as binary programs.
The rest of what you wrote is just spreading fear for notoriety's sake. Pirated software isn't an "invitation" to anything provided you have good anti-malware defenses and good security practices.
Like I get swapping dylibs, but not why that'd be best done by poking around in /System rather than the binary.
macappdownload dot com slash fix-damaged-app-message
macappdownload dot com slash how-to-disable-system-integrity-protection-in-macos
These guides are all over their websites, especially at the download stage, where there is a short list of 'download instructions' with a link to these guides.
A while back I read someone saying that these websites are owned by a Russian hacker network. Touch at your own risk.
These guides I linked to are there because when the software is being installed, it asks for these guides to be applied, to make the apps work. The modifications added to the cracked applications by the crackers take them off Apple's trusted developers list. So the only way to get some of them to work is to disable SIP and GateKeeper. This move then makes the user's computer vulnerable to all malware, because most forget to turn them back on. They also often don't know about the importance of these security features in the first place.
I am not concerned for your safety - I trust you will be safe. I am scared for the user I described above.
I hope this make it clearer.
I won't bother replying to more of your messages until you can show that you've actually tried this all out on a VM, because otherwise we just won't be talking about the same thing.
You could run the application in a VM without networking capabilities.
There is no such thing as good anti-malware defenses. Most of the antiviruses are 80% bullshit + 20% obsolete, yet asking for money and full-time administrator privileges and unrestricted Internet connection (doesn't that sound suspicious?). Besides patching vulnerabilities regularly, being very careful of what files&websites do you open is the only real protection… as long as you don't come in contact with a fresh exploit which doesn't need you to let them.
You prove my point for me. Good defenses doesn't consist of solely antimalware software. Defense in depth is needed, along with education and awareness of new vulnerabilities.
The sum total of things you do to keep your systems uninfected are your anti-malware defenses.
This baffles me, especially for Netflix original content. Is it because they think the UI would get cluttered?
We have that over here. Said taxes also apply to hard drives, iPhones internal storage, etc
BUT it isn't meant to compensate for illegal downloads (the music & film industry tried, but I believe it was the EU that told them that was illegal). It's supposed to compensate for the supposed loss occurred from people's right to make private copies of legally obtained copyrighted materials.
It's whacked and non-sensical, but still. We are after all the country where you have to pay artists copyright associations for playing copyleft music in your shop.
I used sci-hub during my last year in school, but it was only just starting. It was far easier to use, plus I didn't have to compile a list of papers to fetch and wait until the next day to retrieve them.
javascript:window.location='https://sci-hub.tw/'+window.location
I don't know how well funded your university is—some are so much so as to make the caveat I'm about to mention a bit silly—but, for many reasonably funded universities, a statement like yours has to be qualified with "I have access for now …". Publishers can, and do, up their prices unreasonably at any time, and, at my university, I always have to assume that the access I've got today might disappear with a greedy price grab by the publisher tomorrow.
(I can sort of see the idea of making a price grab and then not having access to future articles, but having _no_ access even to past articles is a horror scenario)
I'm trying to understand what you disagree with in the article. If anything, it complements sci-hub's "alleged seamlessness."
Complement means when two things go well together.
Sci-Hub, more so than RG, therefore seems to have a greater potential for disrupting the current order of things and poses a significant threat to publishers and librarians, who cling to the mistaken belief that the key to Sci-Hub’s success is its alleged seamlessness (a single sign-on), which if they can replicate will go away.
The author is arguing that seamlessness is not Sci-Hub's only advantage versus traditional channels, but that "Much of the growth of Sci-Hub is therefore ideological", "publishers are seen as the enemy, whose greediness erects unnecessary barriers, thereby obstructing the advancement of science" and that "Sci-Hub is seen as a ‘Robin Hood’ figure"
That seemed to agree with the bulk of the article, even if they also liked the UX better. The article doesn't say it isn't better, it just says that the UX isn't the primary reason most researchers are using it. That seems to jive with OP.
curl -LH "Accept: application/x-bibtex" https://doi.org/<doi>Out of curiosity: why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?
Most publishers prevented you from doing this as of a few years ago (I left academic research around that time). You were not allowed to post any content that contains any work by the publisher (even formatting/editing changes after first round of reviews). Thus you could only publish a "preprint" which no-one can rely on to cite because they don't know what's in the final peer-reviewed version. Some publishers are more lenient than others but there's definitely friction induced.
(And ideally this note would also mention any substantial changes, like "new section 4 explaining..." or "derivation in 3.2 re-written, but no change to conclusions", for the benefit of those who already read v2.)
As for why it's not enough—because hiring committees and funding agencies almost never take unpublished (that is, in a proper journal) manuscripts into account when evaluating you and your funding proposals. This is what needs to change in the first place to break the loop.
Why are these intermediaries still around? Peer review is the real value provided by a scientitic journal and the people who do that have no reason to be loyal to these companies since they don't get paid.
Because publishing a decent journal - even online but certainly in the real world - involves a whole lot of work: Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. That's all when we ignore the peer review itself which requires domain expertise.
Taking into account that they don't really do peer-review and don't pay for it either, and that their editing is close to nonexistent (and as likely to introduce errors as to improve anything), all the other costs seem to be a self-perpetuating loop - the work is being done just to support itself, with no actual surplus value being produced. It's a resource leak, a circular reference in the economy.
It's not meaningless, either. If you have a hundred venues for publication - what should you choose to follow? What should a library subscribe to? What do you recommend to students? etc.
I am also a big fan of open-access and hate paywalls myself. I also don't like big, for profit, predatory journals. There is value in curated and managed journals. Just not the value that these big corporations are reaping from them.
The others require the appearance of having done so.
I’ve seen plenty of researchers say “information should be free” and then later publish everything in closed journals because the open access ones have low impact factor.
Seems hypocritical to me.
If so, why is the prestigious curation of the journal that leads academics to reading your paper and taking it seriously inextricably tied to whether or not it's behind a paywall at all?
What's stopping someone from building an alternative curation pipeline on top of open access journals that gives academics equal or better signal/noise to the journals they read, and a similar socially accepted prestige for getting into that curation pipeline?
I get that there's not a clear path to monetization, but maybe it's possible, particularly if you could execute more targeted curation for academic subfields that are too small to have their own journals, that you could find some donors and lean on academics supporting the curation process themselves out of their seeming discontent with publishing to drive down costs.
A lot of scientists talk big when it comes to open access, but when it comes time for them to publish their own work, they published in closed journals since they have a bigger impact factor.
They basically put their own careers ahead of their belief in supporting open access.
That is a substantial sum even for professors from wealthy countries.
Which country are you from? Where are you now, in industry? Is there less toxic environment than in academia?
To support my stance I can cite the German phenomenon (many attribute it's 19th century industrial growth to unconstrained knowledge distribution made possible by lack of copyright laws) and the biblical "miracle of the five loaves and two fishes" where Jesus replicated five loaves and two fishes to feed a lot of people (today copyright advocates would say replicating bread this way meant "stealing" from the baker). And the fact I then buy a legal paper copy whenever I read a pirated ebook if I liked it while the lack of a pirated copy availability would never cause me to buy a legal copy (countrary to the concept of lost profit copyright advocates use).
At the same time I was initially surprised about the fact the scientific society is openly speaking pro-SciHub and pro-LibGen: most of the same people would generally say piracy is bad both because it's "stealing" from the copyright holders and because it means breaking a law. They would condemn using cracked apps, sharing movies and ignoring licenses, I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from the university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub. I find this phenomenon curious.
With textbooks a reasonable amount of the money goes to the authors. Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them.
It is not so with papers though. The professors who write them lose little if anything when you pirate their research - those who lose money (elsevier and co) in that case are (rightly) perceived as not deserving anyway.
I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition each year.
For mathematics, all of my course materials were available in PDF format for free (which I could then print myself if I wished to). For Philosophy, the majority of readings were available through the library system. Some courses did require a textbook, but use of older editions was encouraged, and often a photocopied "pack" of the relevant chapters would be made available for a small fee (<£15) by the faculty office.
Source - I was in a class where a lecturer broke this rule. It was a £100 book with only two copies in the library for a class of 30-40. We (students) queried it and the lecturer was ordered to bring a printed copy (as in laser-printed) of the relevant chapters for each student.
In fact, in my experience the student union actually took advantage of that situation instead.
When I started studying at TU Delft in 1991 the student union had a deal with the local bookstore to give 10% discount to their members. So in your first week as a freshman you were told to become a member of the student union because you would get a discount on all those books written by professors.
The student union said they represented 95% of the students, but 90% of them were only a member of the union because of the discount.
Oh. I see they still have the discount, and the student union actually has their OWN (commercial) publishing house nowadays. https://www.delftacademicpress.nl/index_en.php
"Members of the VSSD get a considerable discount on the books of Delft Academic Press because the publishing company is part of the student union VSSD."
It does depend a bit on the university though. I've heard that some have a more oppositional relationship. And there are still issues with some students not feeling represented by the union. They are usually democratic institutions though, with every student getting a vote if they want it, which helps alleviate the worst of those issues.
That's because textbooks is a scam the professors are in on and profit off.
There is an important difference between the paper publishing market and the others, which is that scientific publishing is 100% extortive. It provides no value at all.
Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that so-called piracy not necessarily decreases sales - remember I'm not really advocating for copyright laws, just defending the coherence of the opinions of the people you are mentioning, who probably think that it does. From that standpoint, if everyone stopped paying for movies, Hollywood would close and no movies (except for hobbyist movies) would be made. If everyone stopped paying for music, music would still be made but no one would make a living from it. The same with books, etc. So in those fields, there is a causal relationship between not paying and the field itself being impacted, as well as the income of people that are doing honest work.
On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. The accessibility of science would improve (everyone would be able to access papers without paying). The only ones that would suffer would be publishers that are doing largely an evil thing (restricting the access to scientific knowledge - it's hard to actually argue that they are providing access, as publis repositories already do that for free) and if they closed, it would be a net positive for science. Thus, and to sum up, it's really hard to defend paying scientific publishers, even if you generally believe in IP and copyright, because the whole market is a huge net negative for society, which is not true (or at least, not commonly believed to be true) of most other IP markets.
Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets submitted to Elsevier and alike publishers (and the fact a paper is published there itself boosts a paper perceived credibility even though many papers they publish happen to be bullshit) and papers published on people's personal websites only are not taken serious. It seems like people still need Elsevier for some reason.
For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers? In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If you have enough indexed journal papers, you get a pay rise. If you don't, you not only don't get the rise, but you have to teach a punishingly high amount of class hours, basically leaving no time for further research. So for any professor that wants to do research, passing this assessment is pretty much needed. And the overwhelming majority of indexed journal papers are in Elsevier and the like, and it's highly likely that it will be the only thematic fit for a given paper.
Similar mechanisms are in place for tenure requirements, recruiting, grant calls, etc. Changing them is difficult. I do try to fight for it as much as I can, but it won't happen in the short or medium term.
And why do publishers like Elsevier hold most of the indexed journals? Pure inertia. We keep sending papers there because we need to for reasons like the ones explained above, then our papers get citations, so those journals keep their impact factor high. And it is extremely difficult for new entrants to break into the rankings, because sending a paper to a new journal that is not indexed yet has a huge opportunity cost (months of work that you aren't going to get recognition out of for tenure, promotion, grants, etc.) so unless they start with really great momentum (support from a powerful scientific society, an open letter by big shots in the field, etc.) they never get the needed papers and citations to climb the rankings. So it's not that publishers do a better job so their journals have higher impact factors, it's that they have a captive market.
And then there is bibliometrics, the art of lying with publication statistics. Everything humans get wrong is even worse there. A. Aaronson is different from Al. Aaronson, right? No paper has more than 3 authors, right? Journals always count for something, conferences don't, right? etc.
In Spain, gift authorship (adding authors that didn't do anything, typically in a mutual arrangement) is not uncommon. Not predominant, but definitely not uncommon.
If we ever hope to change things we need to go on the offensive, and that starts with speaking the truth and never using the false terms put forward by the industry. So say Intellectual Monopoly laws instead of IP. If someone is insistent on making the property analogy, agree with them and tell them there is a term that actually is more truthful than IP: intellectual slavery.
I predict that the preprint servers will take over, killing most of the journals which are barely read anyway, and a few top tier journals will survive because academics need to signal status. I personally find https://www.biorxiv.org/ the most useful place to browse for papers at the moment, and stopped browsing actual journals some time ago. If something important gets published in an actual journal, I'll hear about it on twitter.
I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but it defrays the management costs that come with a run-of-the-mill journal operation. For more flashy/fancy journals those costs are claimed to be higher (Nature asserts $40k).
Maybe that's inflated, Nature certainly has some incentive to fudge the numbers. Still, I don't think it's that far off considering the volume of submissions (hence # editors), the general press coverage work they do and just putting out a magazine every week with usually about a dozen publications and two dozen original articles.
If we take it at 1/2 that cost, clearly the average lab can't afford $20K to publish. How do we solve that particular issue? Seems we're back to the "how do you finance good journalism/short-turnaround publications?" question. Don't have answers, but want to get opinions.
EDIT: To clarify, I think most publications would be fine under a fairly small contribution, I'm more curious about the very select, super expensive marquee journals.
We believe this is a very promising way to generate large volumes of labelled data, which we know is what ML loves. The trick is to structure both the biochemistry and the ML properly so as to avoid artifacts and generate useful molecules reliably.
Happy to talk about it in more detail, give me a shout at ntilmans at anagenex.com!
r/scholar (on Reddit) was the precursor to sci-hub, and made most things available.
While the big-ticket journals have a value from being so picky, often this is at the expense of some things. For instance, it is hard to get replication studies published, as journals like Nature want every article to be "front-page news" if they can. I'd like to see some weighted reputation system used instead, where academics can give their "vote" to papers they like, giving it a total weight, however such systems have been proposed in the past and haven't got much traction.
I don't think there is an answer in the above, but I'm not sure that the substantial costs are justified.
That would be gamed, just as there are “citation rings” (I cite you if you cite me) and “peer review rings” now.
So, you’ll need an authority to decide on what votes are unbiased.
That’s the role publishers have now. Are they doing it perfectly? No. Could others do it better or cheaper? Who knows?
A reddit-clone with strong verification/validation of user accounts seems like it would fit the bill. I can imagine a system with a small monthly fee to participate, subreddits with paid moderators (read: reviewers), voting system that would float good papers to the top, and of course comments. The pay-to-participate barrier would hopefully keep the quality high but at a minimum cover the hosting costs. And run by a non-profit foundation.
Pay to publish imho always seemed to have a perverse incentive structure to me. Reminds me of the "advertisement" journals you used to see.
The way I see this headed is academic nonprofit orgs self publishing using open source software etc. and recouping costs through membership fees. Journals are already often closely affiliated with orgs, and the members do all the work except copyediting and editorial portals. Academics are also used to paying academic org membership fees for other reasons.
I've already had conversations in this direction with colleagues.
It's either this or eventually things like the preprint services, maybe with sugar on top.
The killer app in this area would be an open source service / server software for running a journal imho. If it were done well it would be hard to beat.
That said, I think traditional publication models are going to be around for awhile, maybe with much more open access or lower pub charges, just because the publishers do provide a service, even if access and price are distorted, and there isn't a uniformly better model at the moment (maybe too big a conversation for typing on my phone).
It's much harder to say piracy is wrong when content creators receive next to nothing of the publication profits, and publishers are withholding information that pushes humanity forward on many fronts, including ones that save lives. The role of academic publishers is as gatekeepers and rent-seekers, and it's hard to argue that they deserve income simply because they hold this position.
That's totally unacceptable and unethical
What Alexandra has basically done is start a revolution. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.
I would like to donate towards their efforts, too sad they accept only bitcoins.
Arrr! Shiver me timbers.
> papers harvested (illegally)
illegaly? Maybe, in some world states; but not in others.
Also, the illegality is temporary. Think of Marijuana in the US (and many other places). A significant fraction of the population uses it. It took them a good number of decades, but they're gradually legalizing it. With scientific publications - Sci-Hub and Lib-gen are are making copyright law unenforceable for scientific material; and I'm pretty certain this will erode that part of copyright law to decriminalization and legalization eventually.
> in China Sci-Hub is banned
(Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there.
> (Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there.
Political science papers criticizing China?
Any superficial explanation you may get, it's really because central governments are stupid. Absolutely powerful central governments are absolutely stupid.
But, well, it's their loss.
A test seems to show it's not blocked though:
https://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=sci-hub.tw
Closest mention outside of original article is this The Verge article (2018), saying that they blocked China and Iran for a while because of too many requests from users; but this is sci-hub blocking not China banning
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakya...
From where I live Sci-Hub is often slow, breaking down, etc. Help them!
This is like a semiotics game where we play with the signifier and the signified: http://changingminds.org/explanations/critical_theory/concep...
Rule #2 about [REDACTED]: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT [REDACTED]
Of course, how you square that with the journals that charge $30+ for a single paper and $600+ a year for an individual subscription is, perhaps, your point...
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/1/18245235/uni... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California
I’ve got a half dozen subs in a kind of Venn diagram and still am missing things. I’m in a position to pay for convenience, but while paying, am constantly annoyed it’s worse for the user. Same story in film/tv.
It's knowledge, it should be free and open to help the humanity to advance and push new boundaries.
I would LOVE to use my kindle to read journal papers. Many books have well formatted text with figures interspersed. It would benefit the scientific community so much to be able to use them regularly.
(Note that PMC does this, and while I wish the figures were placed correctly rather than at the end, it's a great start!)
Normally, those services would have had to adopt, and we would have ended with Spotify for papers. However, since the clients of those services are mostly public institutes, adoption is stalled and may never happen.
Personally I think that in the age of the internet academics and self-organize their own peer-to-peer reviewed journals with hardly any costs. Those self-organized journals should be free, as they're paid by the public tax. Old style journals are not really needed anymore in theory in the age of internet.
Rather than paste all the details here, take a look at the opendata stackexchange site were we share details about bulk downloads from sci-hub, including torrents: https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-downl...
Note that some other publishing platforms have bulk access, such as arxiv.org: https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data
And platforms like https://unpaywall.org try to link open access papers.
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And if you are a researcher sitting on your PDFs, consider self-hosting, and making an archive.org backup. These will get indexed by Google Scholar. I did so for my papers, and they were indexed in a couple weeks: https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-research/
https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-ac...
If anything such a platform would be incredibly valuable in that academics can also create profiles on them and have an additional CV of their activity in contributing back to their field. This can be used as a real additional metric towards providing someone tenure or getting lab positions.
I don't think so as, judging by the way things are going, OpenAccess will see to that.
Disclaimer: I work for a large "not-for-profit publisher" (make of that what you will) in the UK, and they're scrambling to protect their revenue stream - but not fast enough...
Phishing scams are used to obtain the credentials of university accounts which are then used via a proxy on Scihub to obtain the requested article (it's quite clever..they seem to often silently proxy institution's Ezproxy with the phished credentials) . The same credentials given to Scihub are often not just used by Scihub, and are then used for further phishing or hacking by other third parties, causing harm to the phishing victim.
Having said that, library software providers and journal platforms should be looking at Scihub and learning from it. Users want an easy to use platform with minimal fuss or hoops to jump through.
Of course, this is just a tiny piece of the much larger problem of the rotten unsustainable commercial journal publishing ecosystem..
Random unaffiliated Scihub users in China contacting our University IT helpdesk after the phished accounts Scihub was using to proxy an article had reached it's EZproxy download limit and the 'you have been blocked' message they receive instructed them to contact our helpdesk!
I should note that I am a huge advocate for OA and thinks the who journal ecosystem is a rotten house of cards waiting to tumble. I just see the direct impact of phished accounts at my institution..
Here's the first Google link. It's far too alarmist but should at least give the gist. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th...
One other point I missed that we have to often deal with : when phished accounts are used to mass-download PDFs, many publisher sites auto-block the IP of the requester, which in this case is the University's Ezproxy server. This then means no user at the university can access the resource till the block is lifted (or they could just use Scihub in the meantime :~D ).
I did not tell Science how credentials were donated: either voluntarily or not. I only told that I cannot disclose the source of the credentials. I assume that some credentials coming to Sci-Hub could have been obtained by phishing.
Here's what I think possibily happens : credentials are phished, with Scihub as one of the main "customers", alongside other groups or they are put into the (semi)public domain. They are then used for other nefarious purposes by non-scihub third parties (more phishing, network access etc).
Would university accounts still be phished without Scihub? Absolutely! Would the volume be so high? I'm not so sure. Plus it still causes headaches for fellow university users of the phished account if the proxy gets blocked... especially as publisher customer services are utterly terrible and institutions could be weeks without proxy access to one of the "biggie" publishers!
Especially the gratuitously cruel "credentials given to Scihub are often not just used by Scihub, and are then used for further phishing or hacking by other third parties".
Not sure what sort of proof you want? "Gratuitously cruel" is quite an emotive description! The simplest example is the same phished accounts used by Scihub were also used to send more phishing emails to university and non-university email addresses.
Hopefully you'll see below from my other responses, I'm not here to turn people against SH (I admire it and what they did technically with creating their own proxy on too of other University proxies is really clever stuff!), but the access to articles need to come from somewhere, and I'm just pointing out my experience from working at a university (who I'm sure is sick of paying millions PA for resource access!).
If you bothered to read TFA, you'd have realized this statement was already addressed by TFA's point on publishers mistaking Sci-Hub's appeal as "simple to use" like single sign-on. Which makes me question your credibility.
My perspective is from the University side of things so can only speak for that rather than from the perspective of users who do not have access to the content at all.
I've spoken to users who workflow consists of googling the article title to get the DOI, then putting that DOI into Scihub to get the PDF, without even going near the University's library system. Most of the time the Library actually has an electronic copy, but the process to get them, even with SSO, is laborious and confusing. Just look at the SSO login screens for different publishers sites : some say 'sign in with single sign on', others say 'institutional login', or 'Shibboleth login' etc. How are University users expected to jump through these hoops when the can search for the title or DOI and get the PDF instantly?
For me it's a matter of having access. I can easily find seminal papers like Kleinberg or Watts-Strogatz. Anything that is more recent and builds off of these papers tends to be locked up and I'm not able to afford buying these papers one-off, since I don't even know for sure they'll be in a direction useful to my research.
And academics have an incentive to get their ideas out there so have a tension present when they want to be published in a journal. It is easy to imagine unpaywalled research dominating paywalled. Who cares what people write if it can't be easily read? There are a lot of smart people out there...
I've requested papers through public library inter-library loan services on a number of occasions, and on nearly every occasion was told "that paper/journal doesn't exist". Every single time, the article was sat online behind a paywall.
I don't have access to my alma mater's library and even if I did, I couldn't request research papers through them as a graduate (which is why I didn't pay the yearly alumni society membership and access fee).
So when the option is to pay £20 per page for a short summary article or get nothing -- you can bet I'll be hitting up Scihub.
Black is white and white is black. They are not pirates and they have no connection with the 'pirates' political movement AFAIK. Feel free to contradict me, I'll learn something new.
Also, there's a moral dilemma: piracy or pay (sometime) big money for education resources which can change the world - not a movie or cheap TV Show.
I love sci-hub and have often used it, but the above idea has always been rattling around in my head and gives me pause.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
This is because some of the research (actually I would wager that at least >half, but don't have any figures to back this claim), is supported by public funds and hence should, by definition, not be copyrightable
Could you elaborate on that one?
Also, this phrase suggests that you are of the opinion that piracy is unequivocally bad. Why not think about it as a two-sided coin, with a positive and a negative side?
But it's worth being reminded that it's "piracy" that led to the modern forms of consuming art.
Before Napster the music industry would never move to the Spotify/Youtube model.
Before movie torrents the movie industry would never move to the Netflix model.
Ditto for books, games, what have you.
The exposure to other paradigms, other cultures, other forms of art have vastly improved the quality of life and even educated the masses (especially on less rich places of the world) on such a grand scale.
I think it would be a fools errand to try and prove that the benefits of one outweigh the other.
But it's fine, because, thankfully, we can have both.