An Interview with Sci-Hub’s Alexandra Elbakyan on the Delhi HC Case
science.thewire.in
science.thewire.in
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8ky647/scihub_...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7jxb/archivists-are-trying...
The paper collection software, if I recall correctly, is actually quite simple and uses APIs provided by publishers. It's the store of credentials that SciHub uses (that are provided by academics and scientists) which truly powers the site
For IPFS have a look at https://libgen.fun/ and https://freeread.org/ipfs/
Also see the HN thread on those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209246
Maybe with some granularity, because I doubt many of us would have enough storage to spare to mirror the whole thing.
And while the paper collection software isn't FOSS, it's really the idea behind article sourcing that's important.
actually kind of surprised I haven't heard this yet
>https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th...
>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
Comment 1: >The notion that Sci-Hub is not involved in hacking is laughable. The founder of Sci-Hub, when asked about this, disingenuously replies that Sci-Hub itself does not engage in hacking and phishing, without disputing that it relies on these to operate. More evidence that there is something big and powerful behind Sci-Hub: the Russian mafia.
Or this howler, a blog-post on Russian information warfare that then goes into Sci-Hub:
>In the scholarly information community, some individuals apparently sympathetic with the open information calls of Sci-Hub and LibGen actively shared authentication information, inadvertently providing institutional credentials to cybercriminals and cyberwarriors, who are probably still sitting on the usernames and passwords or, more likely, the information they grabbed before the passwords were changed. Experts estimate that we’ve seen 1% of the information Wikileaks and the Russians have purloined over the years.
>https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/04/03/publishing-in...
The fact that people still fall for this shit, on both sides of the table, is depressing.
Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action, against our broken system where a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
The scientific journal racket is all but capitalism. It's largely rentism disseminated and fostered by entrenched state and institutional interests and status quo. These publisher's devised a scheme where they not only force highly-educated and trained specialists to produce cutting-edge work for free but also afterwards demand high fees for them to access that same work.
The “ideals” of capitalism were shallow post-hoc rationalizations that came after people called out the problems resulting from the mode by which the elite mercantile class had replaced the feudal hereditary aristocracy as the class around whose particular interests the political and economic order were organized.
It was an improvement over feudalism, but the subsequent improvements have occurred with the general replacement of capitalism, in its original sense, with the modern mixed economy; capitalism is now a reversal of progress, not an ideal to aspire to.
This is completely untrue, classical liberals like Adam Smith and John Locke were espousing those ideals well before the word "capitalism" was even coined, it just used to be called Liberalism.
More so, Elbakyan herself says that the work she is doing is motivated by anti-capitalist thought.
Human nature is to sometimes, with a ton of exceptions, maximize resources and utility. This does not mean maximizing profit, unless you redefine profit to be a meaningless word.
That's just like, your opinion, man.
I could also say that finding ways to maximize individual freedom is the ideal of capitalism, and that's exactly the opposite of what Elsevier et al do, so they're the anti-capitalist ones and freedom of information is a capitalist ideal.
In reality, intellectual property is a controversial topic in libertarian/capitalist ideology. See: https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0
As for that being my opinion, it isn't. Capitalism has never been about maximizing individual freedom.
The foundational act of capitalism was the Enclosure Act. How does the Enclosure Act increase individual freedom? It doesn't.
You're conflating a specific subset of negative freedoms for human freedom in general. Which itself was a post-hoc justification for capitalism.
As for freedom of information being a capitalist ideal, why then is it that institutions like state secrets, patent law, copyright law and so on were created under capitalism? You claim that it is controversial, so why is there no capitalist country that doesn't have it? And why was it specifically lobbied for by early capitalists and created with capitalist?
This is just a nice fantasy that was established after capitalism already started. The very birth of capitalism, the Enclosure Act, was to restrict freedom to increase profit.
In fact, the original libertarians and anarchists were a movement that sought to end capitalism, precisely because of its coercion.
Your assertion is quite wrong and far-fetched. Intellectual property is not necessary to "perpetuate the capitalist system", at all, and asserting otherwise has no bearing in reality. Your right to private property and to own means of production does not depend in any way on the state being able to stop others from copying concepts or ideas.
Without the enclosure of the intellect, capitalism is unable to effectively organize research and development, leading to its failure.
The word capitalism has a different connotation than it used to have about 50 years back.
And “communal resources”? What if a private institution publishes a paper? You have a right to access that free as well? All public ally funded research is already available for free.
Publishing open access in journals maintained by the cartel is expensive. Scientists can't really afford to pay this out of pocket, so they tack it onto grant costs, reducing the money they get to actually do science. And it's overall not a pleasant experience.
These journals often offload the cost of publishing onto the authors themselves, and that money is tight. An open access publication is about the same cost as keeping an undergrad employed in my lab for a semester.
And that ignores, as others have noted, that career incentives put "Only publish in open access journals" as the kind of principled stand that might kill a new researcher's career.
Change is hard and it's okay, not everyone will fight for it. But some will.
Jim Crow and segregation were also "the law" at some point.
Unjust laws must be fought and overcome.
https://thewire.in/education/du-photocopy-case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service_s...
Relevant quote:
Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits students and educational institutions to copy portions from any work for research and educational purpose
OpenAccess for a higher charge is becoming a norm though. Some positives. Mathematics community has done a good job at making many open access journals. Biology has only a few: eLife being the most prominent.
https://gist.github.com/usmanity/4522840
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"
That could be what Elsevier & friends are guilty of, but I'd like to see a chain of reasoning that makes it obvious.
Meanwhile, Relx currently has a market cap of £33 bn, and revenue of £8 bn, when it is essentially providing the service of pdf publishing to its unpaid authors and editors.
Arron and Alexandra are extremely brave, and it is Relx and other companies that are taking my property when my tax money is spent to generate research that they then want to charge millions of dollars for others to access.
JMLR is an interesting example, where the editorial board of a top journal in the machine learning field basically forked the journal to an open alternative, and of course nobody hesitated to publish there because that’s where the prestige was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_...
It is helpful to have top tier journals like Nature, but the value is generated by the editors and article submittors. If we shut down the top journals tomorrow new open access ones would quickly take their place, and the behaviour of their owners is parasitic.
The notion that we have no art or artists unless compensated appears to imply money somehow causes art.
If this were the case, then why all the fuss when capitalist music and art industry “discover” an artist? Sure, some pop groups are created, but the greats are discovered, long existing, before glommed onto by publishers or labels.
The argument that artist was not already creating art, uncompensated, for the sake of creation and, particularly for music, sharing, seems without basis in clear objective reality of where art comes from or what ‘causes’ artists to create art.
Perhaps you’re confusing distribution with art. The distribution industry would look very different if sharing were frictionless from artist to fan to fan and no middleman had to get a vig.
This statement makes me think you significantly misunderstand how scientists / universities function. The scientists (graduate students, postdocs, professors, staff) are all salaried employees of the university. The university does take some of the grant money given to lead professors (e.g. to pay the aforementioned salaries).
If someone were to snap their fingers tomorrow and make it so that scientists could publish their work without having to deal with these for-profit publishers, universities would save millions of dollars (per school), taxpayers would save money, and the general public would also have greater access to the work that they themselves funded through public grants.
[1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-uc-split-pub...
There was also a big fight over prices with Nature about 10 years ago.
Universities rarely tell scientists where to publish. That is determined by the scientists, the quality of the paper and the editor of the journal.
Scientists and PhD students need to publish in high impact factor journals for their work to be recognized, for promotions, graduation, etc. There is a lot of work that goes into a scientific publication. It's not a blog (which most people equate it to when they say why isn't it free).
Scientists can make their publications available on their personal website. Generally google scholar will give you a pdf if its available. Some labs maintain papers on their site, other scientists don't. Generally, finding older publications is a challenge.
I've commented on this earlier. Asking the researcher to not publish in these journals is pointless. You need to legislate access. But in general, most scientists will have access to these journals from their university libraries (at least in US/Canada/Europe).
I've never encountered a mandate to publish in certain journals because the university has contracts with them. On occasion there are incentives like breaks on open access fees essentially because the university pre-paid, and there are field specific norms on where to publish.
edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
Another point - journals never charge to publish (conferences do).
I have the proofs of my papers, but I cannot access them online anymore.
https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-...
Also Taylor & Francis may have decent journals in some niches but generally aren't a great publisher.
a. far from ubiquitous
b. often include provisions created by the publisher designed to make discoverability outside of the journal difficult
The editor invites domain experts to review manuscripts. By compensating the reviewers it does not mean that you suddenly get more domain experts. Same people will be invited. But they will be compensated by taking a cut of the publisher's profits.
Or we can cut the middle men and publish in community maintained non-profit open-access journals.
Why is this not a solution?
The trick is to kick out out the for-profit middlemen who are taking advantage of the prestige and impact that various journals built over time, and now they just receive paychecks and free labor.
[1] https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Au...
Beyond that, the best journals in your field may not be open access. In my sub-specialty, none of them are.
1) They restrict access to research with paywalls.
2) The research they publish is usually funded with public funds. Governments do not get money from journals.
3) The work being published is produced by researchers. Researchers do not get any money from the journals.
4) Journals rarely verify what they publish.
So, in short, Sci-Hub is a necessary disobedience movement that aims to end with the most pointless institution in academia: paid journals.
This is not the same as Napster.
There is real time and money involved in songwriting, composing, interpreting, recording, marketing, etc.
In this case, the journals paid nothing for the research they publish, and they share none of the money they make.
An analogy for a journal would be a napster that forces you to publish your music there and then doesn't pay you anything.
They are marketplaces, but from an ethical standpoint they are vastly different.
You cannot stop piracy but a different thing is saying music piracy is legitimate. You are conflating different things.
If you don't understand the difference between Napster and Scihub you probably think music piracy is OK. It is not.
First of all, scholars themselves use Scihub and most scholars that do not have a conflict of interest disagree with how companies like Elsevier operate.
You sound proud of that! So, you're not a musician or artist or writer etc etc, then – I can't imagine any of those saying that. Calling something "a string of bits" to make it sound valueless is a strange trick.
> "This is not the same as Napster" - It's the same thing.
I think Alexandra's point is a good one – they are essentially different:
"The problem is that publishers are not actual creators of these works, scientists are – they do all the work, and academic publishers simply use their position of power in the Republic of Science to extract unjust profits. Sci-Hub does not enable piracy where creative people are deprived of the reward they deserve. It is a very different thing."
In certain fields, journals continue to be published by non-profit learned societies that now, in the digital era, make their articles freely available to all. And they certainly do verify what they publish inasmuch as the peer review process is rigorous and challenging, and even the most esteemed authors end up having to make major corrections to the paper to pass that review.
If you think journals as a vetted, reputable venue for scientific debate no longer have a place, just go look at Academia.edu today where anyone can sign up and participate in discussion sessions. The result: crackpots, cranks, and wacko alt-history or racist/nationalist extremists take over those discussion sessions, drowning out the actual scholars. Thank goodness for journals.
If you are affiliated with the Mickey Mouse Center for Crackpottery and Eugenics, I am going to have that in consideration when reading your content.
This has strong parallels with how the parasitic private sector, in its endless thirst for profit above all else, ruins so many other things that would be better run through public provision: housing, medical care, etc.
That said, a parallel is very poor. Modern academia is a zero sum morally corrupt game, guilty of many sins on its own.
No experience as an insider in academia so can't comment on that.
The only real criticism of them IMO is that they're cyclical with the economy. They tend to build during good times, but the most cost-effective time to build housing is during bad times (now) because construction costs are also low.
In the most basic sense what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention. Being on the cover of reputable journals for a scientist is like being on the cover of Vogue for a fashionista.
When people in India rip off scientific articles using sci-hub they don't compete with the core business model of publishers, they just want knowledge. But journals aren't really in the business of selling knowledge in the first place. Journals survive sci-hub for the same reason Harvard survives free lectures of YouTube and Hollywood survived ripped blue-rays on street-markets. Because these institutions are not in the business of selling textbooks or movies, they sell celebrities and status.
So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling.
That's a very good analysis, I think, but it overlooks that an internet attention economy is a better state.
In the field of machine learning, it has already come to pass. All the top publishing venues (the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the conferences NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ...) are already free of charge and open access for everyone. There are many problems with reviews in those venues (mostly growing pains from the rapidly increasing number of submissions, and problems stemming from the fact that there is 1 single round of review), and indeed the conferences, JMLR and Twitter are now the "attention economy" of the field.
But it has massive positive externalities, namely, you don't need to pay (or have your university pay) for access to the research anymore. The system works as badly (or as well) as it would with the publishers, but without giving them a cut.
As for why people keep paying, the answer is industry lobbyists. Whenever there is a movement to require open access of research, industry lobbyists shut it down. Although in many fields like physics and mathematics, people are bypassing journals (closed or open) in favor of preprints.
If that is all publishers are now, then they are no longer what they once promised to be. Initially many respected journals were published by non-profit learned societies. (In some fields, like certain branches of linguistics, they still are.) For-profit publishers originally told those learned societies that if they handed their journals over to the corporation, the corporation could perform more high-quality editing, proofreading, and typesetting and do it more economically.
Fast forward a few decades, and the for-profit corporations are no longer providing those things. Proofreading and copyediting is now all on the unpaid editorial team (or even on the individual authors). Typesetting is often on the unpaid editorial team, and the publisher wants the unpaid editorial team to simply provide a camera-ready PDF.
So, yes, in the end the for-profit publisher is just providing printing and distribution (which even the non-profit learned societies managed to do just fine) and a vague “reputation and attention”. Sounds like a raw deal.
In my view, it would be ideal if in an open-access world some editors and/or organizations endorsed and vouched for particular papers, and academics competed intensely for those endorsements, if those endorsements were career-making or career-killing, and those editors/organizations made a living from charging scientists for their consideration and review.
That's not the bad part. If the output is available to everyone to read, I don't see the tragedy.
In a world where scientists careers didn't depend on publications, you'd be right.
The problem with scientific publications is that there has not been a Spotify, Steam or Netflix disrupting company that provides the same service in a better way.
EDIT: Thinking more about it, I think such a service would be fair to say have a raw collection of journal articles (it could even be based on Arxiv) and charge for the "curation" layer on top of it. Now the only question is how to kickstart that curation layer in a matter that is trusted by scientists. Maybe it could be something more distributed where also curators (reviewers) and writers get some profit.
Because by copyright law they hold the keys to the kingdom (of scientific literature)
The authors can choose to publish wherever they want - but there is value in publishing in Science, Nature. And their academic overlords acknowledge it too. Who gives a shit if a professor publishes a dozen papers in some obscure journal no one reads?
If you want to solve this issue stop violating the journals copyrights and start attacking the academic leaders who demand professors publish in them.
USENIX is open access I believe, which is great, and I even think some of ACM's SIGs - SIGCOMM for example - make their publications, such as CCR and conference proceedings, available immediately via open access. (I think they are no longer published in print format, so that may save money.)
Hopefully many other SIGs (as well as IEEE societies) will follow suit, and hopefully government open access requirements will improve the situation as well. It doesn't make sense for taxpayer-funded research publications to be locked behind a third-party paywall.
>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are losing money, but it has some merit with proof of attacks changing passwords, etc. Real, tangible damage. I'm not sure this is what Aaron Swartz envisioned. I'm all for vigilante justice or whatever pirates use to justify it (seriously, I petitioned my local college to stop subscribing to them) but this is hardly the same thing.
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th...
The only thing, and I repeat: the only thing that absolutely ridiculous, fearmongering, slanderous article even says outright that they do, rather than just blatant speculation, is PDF downloading.
Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to come to the attention of publishers or library technical departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made 45,092 PDF requests.
What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs. The article insinuates murder but doesn't even try to substantiate their claims of "Oh maybe they're doing something, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe they're doing something evil, yes indeed, maybe they are!"
They aren't even trying at this point.
>What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs
Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.
You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."
Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.
So if there's no proof, and you'd agree with it even if there was, then why bother posting this awful article?
>You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."
I am not negating it, I am admitting that I am wrong.
Right, because Aaron Swartz is famous for negotiating deals to legally license and pay for PDFs.
> They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking
I sure hope so. Relying on credential donations would be a great way to make Elsevier's anti-piracy efforts much easier while landing more academic activists in jail / suicide.
Nuts!
Look at it this way: would you rather A. lose the war and pay Elsevier forever and ever, B. donate your credentials to scihub and get slapped with a lifetime Elsevier ban and big Aaron Swartz suicide level lawsuit, or C. use a sketchy library computer one day and a few months later have to contact Elsevier support to get your account reset because the PDFs won't download?
I don't know about you, but A and B seem really bad to me and C seems much less bad.