Not only scientists need sci-hub.
Educators need sci-hub. People writing education content. Or trying to understand existing content, steeped in misconceptions. Students. A science-literate public.
When I hobby work on OER science education content, or even when I answer a "ask a science/history/whatever question" on reddit, I use google scholar, open access. and sci-hub.
And "I'd really like to see paper X" is not my common case. Though it does occur when double checking that I've finally understood something correctly. My usual case is wrestling with a concept, or trying to put an number to something. I search, and I surf, and I find a paper that might have one helpful sentence in it, 10% chance. And I can check... for only $40! And again a minute later. Or sci-hub. And it's not just greatly reduced friction - those sentences found, are not infrequently, the difference between success and punting, or the lead to a better way of understanding and explaining something.
It's ironic that the American Chemical Society is working with Elsevier to make research literature less accessible to the public, while chemistry education research, describes chemistry education content, using words like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions.
[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1478644710864060...
It's crazy to me that so many students don't know about sci-hub because educators are careful not to mention it in any official settings, but from more private settings it's apparent that _everyone_ is using it.
This also sometimes leads to (small?) differences in academic performance, where the sci-hub-oblivious students can't factor in a highly-relevant paywalled article in e.g. a presentation because they couldn't access it.
IIUC, pre-college has tended to blend in, or focus on, science journalism.
But I suggest there may be long-term potential to use research literature more extensively, and down towards primary school.
Parts of papers can be much more accessible than others. A delightful paragraph in some paper's introduction section. Some photo, or diagram. Some graph. Or parts of a survey paper, or of a 'context of these papers' column in a good journal. There's been work on using more papers, broadly and more shallowly, rather than diving on each. Doing that pre-college, will be tech sensitive.
Tech matters. Small-group collaboration tooling is important. Annotation of papers, by group and instructors, is helpful. Assorted stop-dead friction is amenable to tech fixes - "what does this mean?", "$40?!?", "what parts of this text might I be able to understand [without having to skim it all myself]?".
So perhaps picture some years out, a small group of middle school students, with AR NPC peer support, surfing a content blend, of educational, outreach, journalism, and research literature, with assorted tooling support.
For now, apropos sci-hub... If you think hitting paywalls is frustrating, picture the impact on STEM-retention at-risk students, with little experience, and very uncertain they are welcome here. Or you, now, surfing an HN comment, hearing of research literature being used to teach critical thinking to pre-service teachers, briefly intrigued, which might be gone in a moment, or become the seed a passion project - you google scholar, and... $40 to see more than a low-content abstract. Or sci-hub.
My fiancee is a doctor in charge of a covid ward at our hospital, and at one point this year I heard about some studies re:vitamin D on radiolab and told her about it. She found it interesting, but told me she didn't have access to one of the studies she wanted to read.
I introduced her to sci-hub and she was blown away. She uses it fairly frequently now.
The idea that government-funded health studies are inaccessible to doctors during a pandemic is patently absurd.
Sci-hub does a lot of good.
In other comments I saw the resonable demand to express support for Elbakyan. Recall that we discuss about the biggest free library of research works.
I tried this here: https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/enemies-of-...
Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking protocols?
This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to understand the situation.
I did use SciHub myself this week to read a study that I needed -- not for an academic research problem or business operation, but to simply understand a health condition I personally suffer from.
Apparently it was 55TB two years ago. It's probably still somewhere in the realm of a smallish NAS and I bet a couple people on /r/datahoarders have it all downloaded.
Hosting is a different matter. I'm not sure if there's some effort to have it available on IPFS or DAT
What a time to be alive
Storage is indeed progressing a lot.
Now my buddy that worked on the CEPH storage backed at CERN would laugh at any of these numbers... but that's a different ballpark all together..
Have a tiny online donation setup and you could get full sponsorship or half easily.
That said, complete re-check of 64 TB at 250 MB/s would take at least 71 hour. So ECC RAM definitely won't hurt.
I would gladly do this if a method would be available to load the torrent automatically and set which files are needed to be shared by a specific client.
I’m not intimately familiar with the interactions between libgen and sci hub but the wiki page for sci hub says it hasn’t been using libgen as a storage backend for a few years now.
So there's a monolithic torrent, but we still need to implement a way to search for and download one specific paper, in a decentralized way?
And of course the magnet links isolate sci-hub. And it provides necessary and practical non-piracy validity to torrenting, which helps keep that protocol alive further.
Yes.
Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even when it's free on the journal's site.
This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.
But I read a lot of papers from a lot of people that don't make their papers freely available and who don't use the arxiv (or any other preprint server). This seems particularly common for people a bit older than me. And of course there is the set of papers published more than 20 years ago, say, but which are still paywalled (or worse, essentially impossible to find anywhere). For these, scihub is great.
So it's mirrored, and the monolithic mirror is broken into chunks, but we still don't have a fully decentralized way of searching for and obtaining one specific paper?
Sci-Hub can pull PDF's on demand from academic databases, using credentials that have been secretly donated to them.
Once the file is acquired, it could be distributed with a magnet link, but getting it out from behind the paywall in the first place is the tricky part.
Instead of doing anything at all with SciHub, we should instead fight Elsevier. First blow should be on the basis that Elsevier is anti-competitive, by the logic that if wasn't there would be no reason for it to succeed at all.
Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available, or at least not derive any profit from discouraging public access.
Currently locking people out of information that is often funded with public money is not good for society. So having a small publication charge that can be covered in research is a good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward system of publication with impact factors and citations is indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But there is a lot more work that is thought of in the publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost you time without a finished product. All of this does not cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.
Publishers only archive and index. The rest is done for free by scientists.
This could be done not for profit or government funded (disclosure I work for a non-profit journal publisher) almost none of the expenses of publication are taking in a PDF, archiving it and paywalling it. The expenses are in review, curation and copy editing. For us this expense is millions of dollars a year and is public information.
We already have a free tier of publication in repositories like arXiv. There is still value in curation, selection and facilitating peer review and that cost is non zero.
The PhD scientists we have reviewing your papers, dealing with correspondence and selecting referees for further review are indeed not working for free. If there were a lot of people that wanted to spend a lot of time a day doing that we would not have to pay publishers for anything.
I have been a reviewer at Elsevier, Science and many of this journals for a better of the decade. I personally know the editors of many journals including IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Science etc. They don't get paid for their time. So yeah, the scientists voluntarily review for free. Most journals only archive and index, they do not do anything more than it.
Here are our financials it is public. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131...
Not you but just in general sometimes HN is hard if you post an observation or direct experience that is not in the hivemind. You get downvoted for things even though they are well reasoned and true. I personally don't care if journals get disrupted there are indeed a lot of problems. I work in tech, I will have another job tomorrow. I was just making the point that we don't just have free scientists doing work and then upload PDFs to the internet and charge for them. If that was the case we could have journals for a few hundred dollars a month rather than the 10s of millions we spend. I also too think we are honest, do good work, are thrifty, and provide a good service.
Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.
My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism not working right. Occasionally margins are high because of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top handful of most profitable businesses in the world, making basically all their money on interchange. As a result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in return, right? Fraud protection and security and support and all these important things - what would we do without them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2% in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since. Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add zero value. And even if you like those businesses, there's an even more compelling case for regulating away Elsevier in its entirety.
If you're looking deeper into a business's financials, gross margin can be a useful metric, but for the layman gross margins are usually used for misleading purposes. For example, gross margins can be easily Tweeted to make the point that "this evil business is making money hand over fist by selling xyz", or to indicate that a business is doing better than it actually is (Uber and WeWork, for example, have positive gross margins.)
If you want to know the number representing how much Walmart paid for that chair vs how much you paid, you want to know the "markup". Markup is the difference between the cost of something and the price it is sold for. Confusingly enough, this is represented in different ways in different industries: some represent it as a fixed amount, some as a percentage of the total cost, and some as a percentage of the selling price. If you buy widgets for $4 and sell them for $8, your markup is $4: either (8-4)/8 = 50% of selling price, or (8-4)/4 = 100% of cost.
Markup as a percentage of cost can range from several hundreds of percent (luxury goods) to ~15% (grocery stores.) Restaurants usually mark up food around 60% and drinks around 75%-400% (markup 300% of cost = $6 beer that cost $1.50.) "Keystone" pricing is when the markup is equal to the cost (meaning the ring on sale for $10k cost them $5k) - and is common in many industries including the jewelry industry, although fancier jewelers charge far more and budget sources charge less. Car dealerships, funny enough, have a lower markup than people might expect, between 2 and 5% of cost for economy base-model cars and 15% for high end cars. You can add in a few more % when you start to additional features to the car. (Dealerships these days often make most of their money through financing, service, accessories, warranties, and selling used cars.)
It's very interesting to see historically high markups evaporating with direct-to-consumer sites like Aliexpress. But I've rambled enough in this comment already :)
Sci-Hub and arXiv both manage to be useful without peer-review (not everything these sites host is a pirate copy of a paywalled work), without being selective, and without copy editing. They archive and index, and each seems to do it much more cheaply than Elsevier.
The service Elsevier provides albeit at a high margin and predatory business tactics is more than just archiving and displaying a PDF. And Sci-Hub is stealing the extra value they provide by curation, and peer review facilitation. We might agree with it since they aren't a nice company but the costs of copy editing, curating and reviewing those papers is not being done by Sci-Hub they are just doing the cheapest part of the process by being a repository for paywalled papers. They aren't being more efficient publishers by getting the value add part for free. Someone has to pay for that part. And if Sci-Hub just hosted non pirated work that was not reviewed or copy-edited it would be just as laudable as arXiv.
SciHub seems to have value beyond any "anti-value" Elsevier has.
SciHub use is tortuous infringement in my country, this comment is in not way an endorsement of its use.
Yes there are many such repositories, but all are indexed e.g. by Google Scholar.
Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership.
We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine. Then you have several national and institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of those groups. Etc. etc.
It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20.
> But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances).
And to extend my thought from prior comment:
> Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box?
Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
There are more than 20 already (more like 2000) when you start counting national/university-level preprint servers. As I said, Google Scholar already indexes all of these sites, with many nice features.
Personally I'm very fonf of exploring the two "citation light cones" emerging from one articles - those cited by the article (past) and those citing the article (future).
> Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
I think you're absolutely correct about this. But what I'm proposing (many repositories, indexed by search engines, together giving complete coverage) is exactly like that. A single archive, Sci-Hub style, is more like what Google is trying to do with AMP.
And also Netflix.
Federal agencies with research expenditures greater than than $100 million annually (which covers most federally funded research) are required to make publications they fund publicly available. This press release links to the executive order, which is still in force: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi....
The policy allows journals to generally have a one-year embargo, and agencies are allowed some latitude in how they implement the order, but most new federally funded research should become freely available on places like PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) after embargoes expire.
sci-hub has more ergonomics and uptime than all the others.