Sci-Hub: Elsevier and Springer Nature Obtain UK ISP Blocking Order
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Lots of money and time spent on what will, in the end, amount to a whole lot of nothing as, those who REALLY do want to access Sci-hub, will find a way round this.
No more bullsh*t. No more compromise. The sun does not revolve around the earth, and the overwhelming evidence shows the ideal duration for patents and copyright is zero.
#EndImaginaryProperty #LiberateIdeas #AbolishCopyrights #AbolishPatents #BringBackNapster
We must let go of these archaic ideas in order to safeguard the future of computing.
I think a little more nuance is warranted here.
Information is not property, and its sharing and reproduction is not theft.
I agree that people who work on building complicated information (movies, software, ..) should be compensated, but not at the expense of our right to share. There are many proven business models that guarantee compensation without restricting sharing, but they don't generate as much money as industry standard "passive-revenue" (rent-seeking) scheme of "licensing" and copyright.
It's incredibly sad that many people no longer understand this.
If a 5 year old has a "secret" picture and someone takes it and shows to entire class, they would be outraged.
Not all sharing is good. There are nuances everywhere.
I share something with my friend and she shares it with someone else. Nothing wrong with that. If she were to share it and say she made it that’s lying/fraud. There are consequences for that.
If my friend breaks into my desk and shares photos of the contents, that’s a violent property crime. There’s consequences for that.
Pretending that these are what we are talking about is dishonest.
Johnny: “Sure, show it to me... can I take it home?”
Sara: yes, you can have it. But don’t show it to others!
Johnny: “HEY EVERYONE LOOK WHAT A STUPID PICTURE SARA MADE”
Sara: No! I told you not to show it to anyone else! (Starts crying)
——-
No nuances you say?
> Not all sharing is good.
Try this:
---
Sara: “Hey Johnny! Want to see my new invention? 99% of it is made up of discoveries made by my ancestors. I was on the receiving end of a lifetime of patience and privilege, as my parents (and other mentors) were able to give me a lot of attention as they are privileged (non-propertied) knowledge workers under capitalism, and therefore not as stressed out as the majority of today's working class (non knowledge workers). My luck compounded into a role as lead researcher of a publicly funded research project, where I was able to do lots of experiments and make a significant new discovery which can benefit the owners of this new trade secret/intellectual property. So yeah, check out my work, but do not show it to anyone else. And here, sign this NDA, the capitalist firm I work for asks anyone to sign it.”
Johnny: “Sure, show it to me... and yeah I'll sign that NDA. Can I take this home?”
Sara: "yes, you can. But remember to not show it to others, otherwise they will 1) see how the ability to replicate my research is impossible today because of the privatization of science by capitalists (the continued assault on our shared inheritance), 2) see all the privilege I received, and lastly, 3) to see from the negative research exactly what experiments I did, and that it was not due to my own genius after all."
Johnny: “HEY EVERYONE LOOK WHAT AN AWESOME INVENTION SARA MADE. THIS IS AMAZING AND COULD HAVE SO MANY MORE APPLICATIONS IF SHARING IT WASN'T CRIMINALIZED UNDER CAPITALISM.”
Sara: "No! I told you not to show it to anyone else! Now they can see it. (Starts crying) Now I get to sue you and be backed up by the sickly rich capitalist rentiers/monopolizers who funded me."
---
You know full well that sharing a drawing is not the same as the benefits gained from new discoveries made in science, which has the potential to benefit all humans.
So just like America then? Where did you get this idea that America is squeaky clean and original?
Newsflash: it's not.
Elsevier also did this in India - it pissed me off so much I shifted towards downloading papers from Sci-Hub even when I have a university subscription.
But Sci-Hub and LibGen have radically accelerated my ability to do research.
It can be infuriating when I can't find a book or article that I need. But 9/10 that happens within the digital library system not scihub/LibGen.
sci-hub.se is still accessible to me on EE and Virgin Media.
Edit: s/scihub/sci-hub/
Sci-Hub, a pirate library of academic papers censored by Twitter, PayPal and domain systems, left the distributed domain platform Handshake after two days, unsatisfied by the level of decentralization. ...
“I first just thought that another domain for Sci-Hub won’t hurt. But later I realized it’s them who really controls the domain, not me,” Elbakyan told CoinDesk via Telegram.
The Namebase team reached out to Elbakyan after Sci-Hub was banned by Twitter, reportedly due to a new copyright infringement case in India, she said.
“They wrote to me when I was having that stressful situation with Twitter,” Elbakyan said. “I just gave them an IP address and they connected it to the domain. That’s all I did. Now, where is the decentralization?” ...
“In fact, I’m not in control and they can throw me out at any moment, just like Twitter did. And yes, all domain services are like that, including .se and .do, but they aren’t promoting themselves as decentralized. Plus, those are reputable ones, and this is God knows who. They are just using Sci-Hub to promote this weird project,” Elbakyan said. ...
https://www.coindesk.com/sci-hub-leaves-handshake-blockchain
She thought that having her own TLD was a hassle, so they gave her a second-level domain the TLD of which they managed themselves, but she didn't like that because they managed it.
This could have been very easily solved if she was fine with them giving her www.sci-hub, but it sounds like she thought that owning a TLD would somehow be more hassle than owning a second-level domain. It doesn't sound very reasonable to me, sounds like a misunderstanding.
There was this ICANN session a while back (streamable on zoom) with folks from both Handshake and GNU Name System devs making each a presentation about their "emerging identifiers". I found it really interesting to see how the two projects cover (in my view) different grounds.
Don’t go with major ISPs in the UK. They are a shit show.
This is also the situation in France, where authorities have many times avoided targeting smaller non-profit operators, because they knew those would fight tooth and nail in courts to try and defeat censorship orders.
They may have given up by now but think of those children they saved!
I would and I urge everyone to do so too.
History will look back on this period and see which side of the line people stood on.
#LiberateIdeas
From your comment, it looks like you have zero skin in the game here. Given that your comment is unproductive.
Pretty much everything is prohibitively expensive when it comes to Elzevier and Springer, or so it seems. But that's enough reason to avoid them altogether as publishers, open access or not.
fwiw - I'm also not sure why IEEE and ACM get a free pass either.
researchgate.net & arxiv provide a away around this. Arxiv is well known, not sure how researchgate is doing. Scientists could setup their profiles and papers in arxiv or researchgate and then they can be accessed over google scholar.
Arxiv, research gate, scihub— they all seem to work well together with the commercial publishing system.
I think the world without a lot of money going into scientific publishing would be worse off.
Which they are when a paper is published Open Access. They are covered once, which is ok, because the publication costs also occur once for the most part. There is no reason for a publisher to be allowed to perpetually charge ~40$ for a pdf download.
One other often mentioned criticism is that universities are forced to subscribe to bundles of journals with a mixture of desired journals fudged with journals no one would want to read. Nominally the subscription fee covers a large swath of journals and papers, but essentially the actual value is much more narrow.
To be honest there is no need for journals anyway in our completely digitized world. If all the papers were published Open Access (paid for once) the users could simply filter for the keywords relevant to them. Why would I subscribe to a Journal? This is technology from the last century.
Edit: typo
My only regret is going soft after that. I should have made 100% of my citations include the SciHub url.
It doesn’t seem worth it to have to fight and lose during proofing over what amounts to a DOI anyways
I’m not sure how we get away from the current review system without a coordinated effort involving the prominent scholars in whatever field. The editors are often senior peers, and there’s sort of an expectation that you review others work, and that they will review your work
Pretending research doesn’t exist slows progress and it is anti-science to put your head in the sand because you don’t agree with the location that knowledge was published in.
If you did read the papers in journals you don’t agree with, built on their ideas and didn’t cite them, then you just committed plagiarism and obscured the scientific record.
The “link to the PDF of the author’s homepage” trick doesn’t work because eventually that page will go away, as we have seen over and over in the age of the web. Part of the value journals add is promising to archive the work _forever_. They don’t promise it will be free forever (or at all) - which is what needs to change.
The answer isn’t to “not cite”, but to not publish there in the first place. That takes systemic change. Change of both the incentives: “how do I get promomoted?” or, fundamentally: “how do I make an impact and measure it?”. Citations are the de facto standard right now. It will change when we can measure impact (and get more promotions, grants, etc.) in a way that doesn’t favor the richest journals getting richer.
I get it. Editing and reviewing costs money for journals. That's fine, let them monetize their improved versions but let the tax payers decide if they care to pay for those services or not as opposed to digging around for a researchers public preprint if they maintain one or being forced to dig through Sci-Hub and the like.
arXiv sort of fills this role and is growing in popularity but it's not mandated, centralized for all domains,, or promoted by the federal government which would push such an effort to the critical mass needed for larger adoption.
Are you sure? I'm sure previous posts on here made it very clear that they're peer reviewed for free.
I think the layout costs could be reduced to near zero (ie, enough to be paid through the charity that funds preprint) with no negative impact.
Editing is useful, I think. Although I don’t anything about the current costs or necessary costs.
Here are their pricing policies: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing and their other policies, which gives you an idea what else is involved with managing journals: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies
So, yeah, journals do have costs. I am not defending those costs. But it is worth pointing out that there's more to publishing than a free peer review and uploading it to GitHub.
Editing is generally a paid service — the journal will not correct your typos or your prose. They will find incomplete reference data and ask you to fix them, and that’s about it
https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing#preprint:
“Preprint
Authors can share their preprint anywhere at any time.
If accepted for publication, we encourage authors to link from the preprint to their formal publication via its Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Millions of researchers have access to the formal publications on ScienceDirect, and so links will help your users to find, access, cite, and use the best available version.
Authors can update their preprints on arXiv or RePEc with their accepted manuscript.”
https://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/preprint-sharing/167...
“Springer journals encourage posting of preprints of primary research manuscripts on preprint servers, authors’ or institutional websites, and open communications between researchers whether on community preprint servers or preprint commenting platforms.
[…]
Authors may choose any license of their choice for the preprint including Creative Commons licenses.”
So, if you know the title of a paper, you often can find a preprint, if the authors are willing to make the effort to put them on a site.