And setting aside the principle for a second - how many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
I would also imagine that if these things were more readily available people would be more likely to use them.
Before the existence of sci-hub, I spent several hundred taxpayer euros to download taxpayer-funded research from journals that my library was not subscribed to. I was not aware that asking the library for a single pdf cost about 30 or 40 EUR, until the librarian told me. Then I stopped because it was obviously ridiculous.
I would be very interested to see statistics on this, because I suspect the answer is "almost nobody" - as I assume your question was meant to imply.
> ... [How] many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
Count me in this population, although to be honest it literally never occurred to me to check if the local public library had journal access.
A different question to ask. Why should taxpayers not have access to the articles which they funded for? It doesn't matter whether they read it or not. They pay, they have access.
For various business interests I have paid full price to read scientific studies quite a few times. And I felt foolish about it later once I learned about Sci-Hub. I'm sure there are many other entrepreneurs that could admit the same. Sci-hub is great and a very important service.
Even arxiv was getting flooded with crap and had to do some gatekeeping. Sci hub gets a huge benefit from the publishing industry at keeping out a flood of crap and pseudo science nonsense that floods most places that don't have such a process.
Some do.
And I am aware of that most don't, having published enough papers, reviewed papers, and been asked by journals to review for them.
However, I never claimed reviewers were paid. I did state Sci Hub is getting benefits they didn't pay for, like keeping out crap, the value from being reviewed, uniform quality from known journals, etc.
If I, having published academic papers, and in many cases keeping my own copyrights as I always try to negotiate that (and a surprising amount of journals will let you if you ask), want scihub to not publish my work, funded by me, and published by journals I selected, will they remove it? No?
Then they are stealing the same as others. It's just their theft is popular since it lets people access stuff for free.
A few journal pay editors and reviewers, but the vast majority do not, so Sci-Hub is paying the same as anyone else.
> will they remove it?
Last time I checked, Sci-Hub doesn't host, it proxies, so your license to the journal to distribute the paper is still what applies. The journal has standing, but you don't.
And the idea of uniform quality from known journals is laughable.
You seem to be missing the point:
Who is going to review for sci hub? Reviewers review for the journal the decide to - and that's based on the quality of a journal. I will review for a good journal. I won't for a bad one.
Who would review for sci hub? I wouldn't, and I doubt many if any top researchers would either. Sci hub will accept the crappiest of stuff, so I (and pretty much anyone else doing solid reviews) would not bother.
>Sci-Hub doesn't host, it proxies
Did you check that or write it because you want to believe that?
Sci hub pulls a copy to sci hub using stolen credentials when you ask for a copy. For example, here [1] is one of my papers that sci hub has copied and serves from their site. (not sure how long they cache copies, but it's not hard to see using chrome and viewing requests to tell where files come from). The paper even has a front page and watermarks added in 2016 from where it was downloaded from. So no, sci-hub didn't just proxy to the journal.
[1] https://zero.sci-hub.do/5265/2478517301ba71ba89a837647f1a133...
As has already been pointed out in this thread, the work has been bought and paid for by taxpayers. Your work is based upon the work of others, isn't it? I'm sure your work is filled with citations of other works that were taxpayer funded.
Sure, there is the odd case like yours where you funded your own work. But to argue that the world should be denied access to all scientific knowledge because a tiny, minuscule portion of it was privately funded is pretty lame.
Are you claiming one cannot get paid for their work if it build on the works of anything taxpayer funded?
Are you claiming anything taxpayer funded must be open access to all?
Both of these seem too shortsighted to be reasonable, in which case there is some middle ground. Sci hub taking things because it's popular is not going to be a good model for pretty much any future.
No.
> Are you claiming anything taxpayer funded must be open access to all?
Absolutely.
> Sci hub taking things because it's popular is not going to be a good model for pretty much any future.
Why they're taking things is irrelevant. The fact is that them doing so is a net positive for humanity. There are billions (BILLIONS) of people who can now access knowledge that's been locked away. That's a net positive.
There's only a tiny fraction of that that is self-funded, and those folk can just stop publishing, or find another business model.
>> Are you claiming anything taxpayer funded must be open access to all?
> Absolutely.
Ok, then good. In many, if not most, fields, the vast majority of academic papers are not completely taxpayer funded, and in many cases they are privately funded. For example, in CS, big company R&D researchers did the work. In medicine, a significant amount of papers are from Pharma companies, and a lot of academic work is partially funded by companies. The same is in every field. Sample a top CS journal and you'll see how much of it is not from taxpayer funding - MS, Google, FB, etc., researchers likely constitute the majority of top CS publications for some time now.
So, given that it's now clear that a significant amount of the papers sci hub copies were not taxpayer funded, and probably the majority are not totally taxpayer funded, care to drop the claim it's ok for sci hub to copy these because you thought they were paid for by taxpayers?
Because it, like make things people claim here with no understanding of the complexity or bothering to even look, is wrong.
Did you make that up or actually google to see if any journals pay? Because some do.
I get royalties on stuff I've personally written. Some of it is in technical books, and I've not checked, but I bet sci-hub even copies such stuff.
So care again to claim sci hub is not affecting any authors?
Finally, if an author wants his/her papers spread, it's easy to do. If an author only want their work in a certain journal, then the author can do that. Sci hub removes any author wish from the equation without author permission.
For example, there is no way for me to remove papers I wrote that sci hub has copied onto their servers (see above for an example link).
The bottom line is that in most cases, academics rely on journals even for access to research from other folks in their own university. Things get passed around informally. And there are changing trends, such as preprint archives (like ArXiv), in some fields. But the majority of research is still paywalled.
Edit: To return to your point, yes, I was sort of discussing some Platonic ideal of "The Taxpayer". Obviously, if you live in the US, your taxes don't pay for research in Europe (only for universities' access to that research). And we could be talking about federal taxes for federal grants, but state taxes for state-run schools. But in general, the point is that the journals make exorbitant profits from labour paid with public funds.