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Comment by GlitchMr | Hacker News Reader

Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper. Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or inter-library loans. Non-academic clients may try asking somebody who has a subscription access for a given paper (I know I did provide paper PDFs a few times when asked).

Publishers don't prey on individual users, they prey on universities. They try to get them to pay for journal access. Non-academic clients? Not profitable enough for us, go away. Scihub threatens this business model, because universities may decide to stop paying that money because Scihub exists. It's much more convenient than bothering a random person to provide you a paper or inter-library loan which makes this an actual risk to them.

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My roommate is a student with full access to basically all journals. Funny enough, he still uses scihub because it is easier to use.

This is a big reason why piracy exists even when something is available through official means.

Those offering a paid services should always ensure there is a benefit and convenience compared to piracy. Valve and Steam wouldn't be here if it was clumsy like in the beginning. Gamers like that getting a game is just a click away, that it installs and checks all the required dependencies, keeps the game file updated, allows you to preload and keep your game saves in the cloud (when possible).

That's a really bad sign for mainstream journals.

At the end of the day when considering the behavior of large numbers of heterogeneous users, UX is king for all data consumption. The pricepoint matters, but people would use SciHub even if traditional journals somehow moved to free publication... If the UX is better for SciHub.

I use sci-hub at home because remoting into my academic network requires me to use 2FA. It's not like the journal is charging my institution per download, so there's no monetary difference between me getting it either way. So I go the lazy route and I don't really feel bad about it.

I also have full access to basically all journals and recently surveyed well over 500 papers in my field of research. Sci-hub was an indispensable tool for this, because it provides a consistent user interface to download _all_ papers. I was able to automate 90% of the PDF downloads because of it, some were blocked because of captcha's, but I was able to solve those manually.

This type of semi-automation would be very impractical and cost an order of magnitude more time if I had to dig through the probably non-existent API documentation individual publishers have, or try and scrape their I'm sure by now heavily obfuscated websites.

I assume most of the users of scihub have legitimate access to some content. Even the most well funded universities don't subscribe to every journal. When doing a lit search, it is very common to wind up with many potentially interesting papers you don't have subscription access to. Getting access to these papers legitimately involves writing request forms for each individual paper (as access typically costs something like $40 per paper) and then sitting around for between a few hours and a few days before being granted access. Frequently the papers don't even contain the data you want (which you can't know in advance because you can only see the abstracts before paying), rendering the entire exercise a waste of time. It's far easier to simply jump on scihub, get the data you need immediately, and sidestep this process.

It's also not like there was no piracy before scihub showed up. When I encountered a paper I didn't have access to back in the day, I would ping all of my friends at various universities / companies / hospitals and request that they check if they had access. If so, I would ask that they download it and send it to me. They would do the same when appropriate. Even doing this was more efficient than going through official channels, and every time this was done it represents another lost sale. From a user perspective, the piracy has nothing to do with money and is instead entirely about friction.

Same. When I heard about Scihub, this was the page I usually downloaded papers from. I used to have access to a lot of journals, but downloading a journal was annoying. Meanwhile, Scihub provided a field to put an URL in, and you got a PDF back - which was ridiculously simple.

Visitors to university libraries reportedly continue to be harassed by campus police officers for "overusing" the taxpayer-funded electronic resources which they are supposed to be making available to members of the general public in exchange for the generous property tax exemptions (under so-called PILOT agreements) that they receive from local and state government.

At MIT, a few years after the arrest of Aaron Swartz, a prominent researcher from Mass General Hospital was threatened one afternoon with arrest by an MIT police officer for the alleged "crime" of using one of the library computer terminals for "longer than an hour."

It's worth remembering then that there are some out there who are using SciHub now because they don't want to go to jail for trying to access the same content through more "legally legit" channels.

The current business model of publishers is predatory and harms science more than it helps, but I see self publishing and private open source initiatives as equally problematic. The definitive long-term solution, in my view, is a centralized public repository, like the Library of Congress. Call it the Federal Scientific Repository or the National Research Papers Database. It would be funded by Congress, or the LoC, and peer review would still occur. But the process of publishing papers in journals with editors and letters to the editor, as well as the environmental and financial expense of printing thousands of paper copies of these publications and shipping them to universities around the country, will cease. The hundreds (if not thousands) of thick volumes on the shelves of university libraries are never consulted by anybody - researchers use the Internet - and take up too much valuable space. It's time the research world catches up.

The adjacent-possible path to that all but certainly involves something that very closely resembles Sci-Hub, to demonstrate that the alternative of continuing proprietary publishing will not function.

Without a Sci-Hub-like option, the political pressure on government (and likely: university) archives to not provide free-to-the-public services will likely continue. Only the continued persistence of a truly free option, in flagrant violation of an unjust and immoral legal environment, can break down that wall.

How on earth can self publishing and open source even be problematic? Let alone equally so as ones whose only role is profiteering by restricting public spread only by if they get their cut or not and providing no validation - peer reviewers.

It's the same "discovery problem" that every long tail market encounters: a significant portion of the tail is going to be either low-quality or irrelevant to most consumers of that domain. So you need aggregators, and those aggregators will face pressure to moderate the long tail by surfacing the most relevant results, while also still providing access to the tail in some form (see also Ben Thompson's aggregation theory [1]).

Unfortunately, this dynamic is more social than anything: there can only be so many aggregators that can occupy the zeitgeist. That scarcity of attention leads to rent-seeking behavior, which is the main problem with academic journals. The current situation is probably approaching optimal; large institutions fund the moderation and aggregation through journal subscriptions, while access is widely available via Sci-Hub.

Without a profit motive, such moderation would be even more politically-driven than it is today. At the same time, the Sci-Hub community does need to ensure its continued existence because it is such a massive boon to science writ large.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

The "moderation" part of journals, the editorship and peer review, is already performed virtually entirely by volunteers.

>Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper. Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or inter-library loans.

This may sound tinfoil hattish, but ever since I was in school i've believed it's to keep knowledge out of the hands of the poor. Accessing journals is basically out of the question for ordinary people, unless they go to a university library, or spend money they're not going to spend, almost all reporting on science is complete and utter garbage that at best, gets most of the facts wrong, at worst misrepresents or distorts the article being reported on completely.

I don't like making blanket statements, but i've noticed, many people lack even basic knowledge of scientific methodology and almost see it as a black voodoo magic or something. Average people have no real way to verify scientific claims made by media even if they wanted to.

I have to be honest too, going through school, this attitude was prevalent among my teachers, that scientific knowlege was best left to scientists to interpret for average people. Everything around science has a 'it's our special club' thing going on designed to trickle only what information scientists and authorities deem necessary.

Hell, the data from my own project was locked away by the government behind a paywall, despite it being funded by tax money under the stipulation in our grant that our results and data would all be made publically accessible and we were only studying small mammals.

Science, especially publically funded science, should be available for everyone. I've never agreed with the idea of hidden knowledge. Human progress comes from humans learning and sharing knowledge with eachother. Keeping knowledge locked up for a special elite cripples the progress of humanity.

poor != unintelligent

That said, I get the concern that non-scientists can often misrepresent scientific findings. I read the other day that apparently lemon peels are 10,000 times more effective than chemotherapy at treating cancer for example. But I don't think the solution is to lock away knowledge. The solution should be to try to educate people as much as possible.

>But I don't think the solution is to lock away knowledge. The solution should be to try to educate people as much as possible.

Yeah...me too...I'm guessing people didnt actually read what I wrote...

I did read what you wrote but your position was somewhat unclear. Your first several paragraphs seemed to conflict with your final statement.

Unfortunately, providing access to everyone would be incompatible with publishers' business models. As long it's more profitable to not provide the access the everyone, business will continue to do so.

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