UK police warn students to avoid science website
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The quote from Max Bruce, the City of London Police's cyber protection officer that "Sci-Hub will then use [stolen credentials] to compromise your university's computer network in order to steal research papers" shows some fairly serious misunderstandings of how scientific research is funded, carried out, written up, shared, and published ... and which multinationals get rich from selling access to the very last bit.
It's not ideal though, but search engines like Google Scholar are good at finding the open-access versions of paywalled academic works and linking to the PDF of them.
What I found was that the actual _content_ is served by the university - free for all etc, but any typsetting, editing and formatting became the publisher's property. Yeah sounds daft, but, well, you can get all my papers either directly from the university (via a centralised UK catalogue that Google has managed to link quite nicely) or pay £20+ a shot to Elsevier for the same thing. (Maybe it's different? Looks better? A nicer font? I honestly don't know, but I'm pretty sure the results and stuff are identical, would be quite funny if they weren't)
Might seem pedantic but it's important to be precise: presumably you mean freely available? Publishing makes something publicly available by definition.
Not wishing to sound facetious, but where would I get the PDFs, other than from - say - SciHub?
I have the original bound journal for one of them, but you can bet your bottom dollar it would be illegal for me to start making photocopies of my work and handing them out...
It might not be pixel-perfect like a photocopy, but the words should all be there.
I was once congratulated for publishing a paper I had no idea existed, after I gave someone permission to use my research work in exchange for credit.
It took me some effort to view a copy of what I had "written".
With digital formats, the general approach is to export a PDF from LaTeX (or whatever is used to write the paper) as an author pre-print copy (i.e. not in the final form used by the journal), and publish that one. From a technical legal perspective you would likely need to look at what agreement you signed with the publisher at the time (if any), since that may restrict distribution of the text.
This raises a good point though for works that were pre-open access, and the risk of them "rotting" behind paywalls out of being in a state of legal limbo. Newer science will be more accessible due to open access rules, but older science may end up effectively "lost" to those without access to these paywalled repositories.
There's no real incentive for those publishers to open things up, as they rely on institutions paying large subscriptions to preserve access to the legacy archived content, and that keeps their many thousands of staff employed.
When enforcement is more strict, researchers sometimes resort to hosting a draft of their manuscript, and not the final camera ready version.
Unfortunately, in many fields open access or even just personal hosting and is still uncommon, and the vast majority of papers remain behind paywalls.
Of course, it's not perfect since it still requires work on the part of the author, but all they have to do is give it to a university library and they'll make sure it's available as soon as it's allowed.
Give what? Their permission? The source document (pre-print) that went to the journal? The PDF of the published article?
[1] https://www.openaccess.nl/sites/www.openaccess.nl/files/docu...
I'm genuinely interested in how this works in practice. Also how do authors obtain a PDF of their published work other than from the publisher?
Would be great to hear from Dutch researchers (particularly those publishing in Elsevier journals...) on how well this procedure is working.
and this is fine for most people.
(I'm not connected with Nature).
They call it "open access" if I remember correctly and it's a couple of times more expensive than it already is.
Universities pay a lot of money to publish in these journals.
https://www.nature.com/nature-research/editorial-policies/se...
"Preprints
Nature Portfolio 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. Preprints are defined as an author’s version of a research manuscript prior to formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server (as described in Preprints for the life sciences. Science 352, 899–901; 2016); preprints may be posted at any time during the peer review process. Posting of preprints is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Nature Portfolio journals. Manuscripts posted on preprint servers will not be taken into account when determining the advance provided by a study under consideration at a Nature Portfolio journal."
The end result is that the vast majority (i.e. almost all) such research (regardless of how funded) is public and accessible on the institution's repository, or otherwise deposited with an open access library, such that it can "count" towards the metrics.
A clever approach if you ask me - find what matters to the individuals concerned (the metrics), and discount work from those metrics unless made freely available within X days, with appropriate audit trail to match.
Why?
> The police are concerned that users of the "Russia-based website" could have information taken and misused online.
Police (and politicians in general) should be careful about the fire they're playing with. There are some valid reasons to be concerned about hacking based out of Russia, but if every time they want to try to cast aspersions on things they don't like by highlighting connections to Russian they run he risk of people just totally discounting that warning in all cases.
If people see a "WARNING: This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm" label on every other product they buy, they tend to completely ignore that label. And the reasoning behind it is very simple too, because if almost everything causes cancer, then what is there to do about it and why even worry.
https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/news/city-of-london/news/...
> Sci-Hub is a series of websites that enable free access to over 70 million published scientific papers of all disciplines. It is estimated that it includes 80% or more of the world’s currently published scientific papers, with the volume of data being roughly two and a half times the size of Wikipedia.
Fantastic!
> Sci-Hub obtains the papers through a variety of malicious means, such as the use of phishing emails to trick university staff and students into divulging their login credentials. Sci Hub then use this to compromise the university’s network and download the research papers.
A) Is this true?
B) If so, is it a bad thing?
B) Yes, but only due to the potential sensitive nature of the credentials unrelated to the downloading of papers.
Phishing, though, crosses the line. Once you start tricking people and removing their agency, you’re the bad guy.
Note that Sci-Hub's model wasn't concerned citizens uploading articles, but academics (allegedly, at least) sharing their credentials and Sci-Hub using those to download requested articles if they didn't have it in their own caches yet. With that method, it seems a lot less unlikely to me that a relatively small number of academics could have "contributed" many articles.
The BBC could have asked Sci-Hub and students for comment to add more sides of the story.
Compare
https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/police-forces/city-of-lon...
https://www.met.police.uk/police-forces/metropolitan-police/...
And it's weird that the police are advising people not to use Sci-Hub. In England copyright violation is a civil matter, not a criminal offence, unless you're doing it as part of business or you're doing so much of it you're distorting trade. It's simply not a police matter.
It seems clear that Sci-Hub is a great boon to the promotion of the arts and sciences.
It wouldn't even be unprecedented to have laws that "encourage" contributions. Think of the old library of Alexandria, or even the modern library of Congress.
The writing follows no thread, the article contains no more information than interleaving parts of two press releases would give you, it's a complete mess. This would not pass for a decent writing assignment at the high-school level — and yet it's published by the BBC somehow. Even the subheadings are weirdly chosen.
Was this even touched by a human?
Here's an example:
Mar 14 "Ageing equipment puts Army at risk, MPs warn British army armoured vehicle. The British army is likely to find itself "outgunned" in any conflict with Russian forces" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56386446
Then 3 days later a new UK foreign policy increasing military spending https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56391994. The fact check here from the BBC is interesting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56417924
What happens here is that voters see the first article, it sits in their mind a bit and they think "well maybe we should increase military spending, we need a good armed forces" then lo and behold their wish comes true a few days later.
We're just living in an real world Yes Minister episode.
Very short paragraphs in a semi-random order, together with a smattering of out of place headings. I assume they must have some internal style document, because it applies to a good chunk of their stories on diverse topics.
"The occasional quote which is unsourced, and doesn't have an end quotation mark.
Questions have been asked
Not unlike this comment really.
I suck at writing in general but it just seems so odd to me that the article quotes such short phrases.
Then you get several sentences on the police's view, and several on Sci-hub's.
It's mechanically straightforward, like most news.
Until we actually understand what's being done to us, we're all just blowing in the wind.
That's the first I've heard about this, and it would represent a very different perspective on Sci-Hub to the traditional anti-copyright Robin Hood styling.
That said, even though CoLP is a rather strange police force within system here, it would be surprising for it to make a definitive public statement like that without being reasonably confident that it was correct. Is there any truth to that allegation?
This isn't about enforcing scientific orthodoxy. It's about making sure that the journals get their inch of green for accessing that orthodoxy.
Non-official science views are everywhere. These are the gatekeepers of official science views, maintained by copyright. The people who can't get past those gatekeepers are usually desperate to get them into your hands.
I think I remember the Indian government proposing something similar to this current sci-hub initiative.
Obviously I don't know if sci-hub is the right way to go about these things, and I wonder how this would change the incentivization behind research. From my understanding though the main gatekeepers here like elsevier act as more of a financial leech on the system rather than providing any real value; since they aren't the ones funding the research to begin with. Would be interested to hear other's take on this.
Later the uni found out, asked questions and the person just lied they were 'tricked'. Uni makes a police report and the police just takes it at face value.
Why would anyone need to hand over their credentials to sci hub if it weren't for this purpose? Neither the BBC nor the police present any evidence of this "phishing" that I can see.
If I still had access to my university creds I'd totally give them to sci hub. They're doing God's work.