Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist and right (which, from my point of view, is unlimited sharing of what is usually copyrighted in this case) is more important than legal.

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.

While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two stances you mention.

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.

> 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.

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.

Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc.

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.

Out of curiosity, how does that research assessment treat papers with multiple authors? Does it only give credit to the first author, or does it divide credit by the number of authors?

Depends. But usually being first author counts for more in most fields. However, e.g. in particle physics papers with hundreds of authors are common, alphabetically sorted. Sucks to be Z. Zymmer, nice to be A. Aaronson. People from the field of course know about this. Sometimes they might even act accordingly. But politicians and administrators far too often don't.

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.

Turkish higher education committee ignores multi-author papers completely and only counts single-author or advisor-student papers, in the first appointment of professors; and severely discourages multi-author papers in reassessments.

... which is another silly approach. So a pair of researchers who always work together on projects supposedly never publish :-(

They do anyway, because there is no negative consequences for publishing multi-author papers, just not rewarded at first appointment (this is mainly because they failed to figure out which fields have their authors ordered and which have it unordered).

I'd support dividing by number of authors, but it doesn't. A paper counts the same regardless of number of authors (and regardless or whether you're first author or not), unless it has "an atypically high number of authors for its field" (or something like that), in that case the committee can decide not to count it at all.

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.

So it turns out publishers like Elsevier do provide a value of an "indexed journal" status? Why can't the same be done for free?

It can indeed be done for free, and in fact there are some totally free journals that are indexed (actually I am using "indexed" as shorthand for clarity/simplicity, because it's a bit more complex than that: it needs to be indexed on a certain database -proprietary, by the way- and ranked with a high enough impact factor - a crude metric based on citations per paper). The problem is that they are still a minority, and often if you are working on subject X, it turns out that no indexed journal on that subject is free. Or maybe there is one, but your paper gets rejected from it so you then need to resubmit to a non-free one.

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.

>I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from net university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub

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.

> Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them.

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.

Here in the UK we don't seem to have this problem for some reason (possibly strong student unions?). I have studied at 3 different universities, and none of them required me to spend more than £100 total in course materials for a 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.

At least at the university I studied at, lecturers requiring their own textbooks for a course was explicitly barred as a conflict of interest. The only time it was allowed was when copies of the relevant chapters were provided free to all students in the class (in PDF or printed form).

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.

> for some reason (possibly strong student unions?)

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."

At most UK universities, membership of the student union is automatic as part of joining the university (there's no fee associated with being part of the union, so there's no real reason not to join), and the university funds and coordinates with the student union to provide several university services, especially anything to do with social life or student well-being.

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.

At my University in Germany maybe 10% of professors required a textbook (usually their own), and they were always reasonably priced (20€-40€, depending on size). Also the university library always stocked a healthy amount of those books, enough for maybe 10-20% of the students taking that course. Usually the library either didn't run out of books, or you could still get a copy at a more distant library.

Maybe could be related to the tuition as well? In most of Europe universities are free for the students

It could be, but I believe this has been the case in the UK since well before tuition fees were introduced. In the past, I think it was mostly a non-issue there were far fewer students, so university libraries generally had enough copies of books to go around.

There's a steep discount, but they're certainly not free in the Netherlands (nor in many other European countries).

Actually they are writing them during that time and use their staff (paid by public money), too. Whether it's copywriting, news checking for the next edition or, in fact, writing passages.

> 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.

That's because textbooks is a scam the professors are in on and profit off.

You are not the first to logically argue that the IP concept should not exist. The problem is the people behind IP laws benefit tremendously from the lie and don’t have incentive to examine the system more closely. It would be like if tobacco makers called cigarettes “health sticks” and successfully convinced the world of the lie.

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.

Pharma industry in Switzerland also grew rapidly after start due to the fact that it didn't have patents, unlike neighboring countries.

It's not really that curious. Textbook publishers pay professors significantly more than Journal publishers. Hard to get a group of people on your side when you're exploiting their work for profit and giving them jack in return.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com