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Comment by newyankee | Hacker News Reader

I mean nowadays i see a lot of motivated and young crowd in India who have become very knowledgeable due to the explosion in many scientific and other such youtube channels in India. Previously amateur researchers could not get access to research papers due to the prohibitive cost of access (unless they are in a really top notch university, which frankly told is highly limited in India as it is purely a numbers game). Sci-hub really enables access to many such folks.

A similar story played out in the last decade (2000 - 2010) when affordable streaming platforms did not exist. Many folks got familiar to global movies and shows due to piracy as the price of even legal DVDs were prohibitively expensive.

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I think it's also a strong psychological thing. I work for a German company, so paying $40 per paper is no issue. But I still usually close the tab as soon as I see that it's Elsevier.

Those people who are interested in me reading their work will send an arxiv link or put the PDF on researchgate or publish open access. Especially for mathematics, I need a printable PDF so that I can take notes. That makes DRMed publications impractical to use.

So if someone only links to the paid version of their article, I usually just assume that they're an arrogant prick and skip to the next paper.

There's now more good new research being published than I could ever read. Researchers need to adapt to that by reducing friction.

I would like to promote the Netherlands here. The university I'm working for aims to have all papers open-access. This is derived from national policy [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_in_the_Netherlands...

You probably know this already, but for the benefit of others: While it depends on the subfield, a lot of computer science and mathematics papers are freely available.

1. Searching for the title often gives you a PDF in the first few results already. Authors usually have the right to upload a version on their personal website or arXiv.

2. There is Google Scholar [1], which has links to PDFs on the right of the result (if it knows one). It is better at this than regular Google search, in my experience.

3. Manually searching on the author's website (or former website, if they moved) sometimes proves successful, although this is relatively more effort.

4. As mentioned, writing an e-mail to the authors works as well. (If you buy a paper, the authors get nothing, so there is no incentive not to share it.)

[1] https://scholar.google.com/

> There's now more good new research being published than I could ever read. Researchers need to adapt to that by reducing friction.

That's encouraging to hear from at least someone since it doesn't meet my experience. What I rather see in the few fields I still care about is that we're flooded with a mass of unoriginal and uninspired papers, many using a ML approach, where the purpose is clearly to get graduation or tenure rather than advancing the state of the art. It's happening to a degree that even assessing the major contributions in a field and separating me-too publication from the few original and foundational works has become impossible, similar to how general web search has become pointless. I'm all for free access, but 1. major works have always been published as author's copies with free public access 2. I really don't see any advancement in scientific quality at all as academic achievements are becoming just stepping stones and academic institutions career networks more than anything else.

Edit: also want to mention citeseer as my search engine of choice which seems to have improved a lot after their rewrite ten years ago (which made it useless for me)

I'm interested to hear why you think general web search is pointless. I know that SEO and Google dropping various search functions has made things a little more annoying, but it's still easier to find information than it's ever been.

No it's not, like at all. For nearly every topic I can think of in SW dev, where I usually have a pretty good idea what I'm after, I'm hitting hundreds of naive content-farm clickbait articles when I used to find posts by experts in their blogs, in forums or mailing lists not even ten years ago. At first I blamed Google for sending me to the sites with the most AdWords and Doubleclick ads on them, but with DuckDuckGo consistently giving me just the same results, I believe the problem is rather with the incentives for producing content (or lack thereof), with Google and Facebook having extracted all value out of what used to be "the web". It's not going to improve with ad prices going down the toilet, and Google increasing their efforts of monopolizing every single point of contact as they're struggling to grow. Today if I'm "researching" (not in an academic sense) a topic, I go straight to StackExchange sites, and sites like HN. Life's too short to care about the world of copycat shite that Google indexes; people may find that "searching 456678743 sites in 0.03s" is not, in fact, very useful on the extant web.

As odd as that sounds, I believe there's a market opportunity for a company to start out again like what Google used to be: a search engine used mostly by technical people and searching within a well-defined small circle of websites.

Would be pretty awesome if YouTube channels are translating and explaining new research in local Indian languages. This could give a significant boost to public scientific awareness.

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