FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

There are many things available through e.g bittorrent because the author made it so.

The "reproducibility crisis" is that we recently realized that ~half of published results in many fields fail to reproduce, presumably because many of them are false. My impression was that this goes back as far as you care to look, and that old results are just as likely to fail to reproduce. So the only new thing is that we noticed this, which is a step forwards, not back. Is there reason to believe that older studies tended to be more accurate?

There are plenty of cases where good researchers can't get published because peer reviewers either don't understand or misunderstand the work being done (even Geoffrey Hinton has complained about this).

Then on top of that we have vast amount of research that cannot be successfully reproduced, and this has been happening for decades. Largely because we have created a culture of 'rubber stamp' science.

The correct publishing paradigm has lead to blander and at the same time quite often garbage science.

It'll be a long time before the traditional journals lose influence, but lots of the newer journals that arose were scams or ways for professors to publish what they wanted. It's a mess.

The result of getting rid of the reputation system of prestige journals isn't obvious. It's possible that without the incentive to get into the most prestigious journal possible, many researches will lower the quality of their research. But I think it's more likely that without the hope of getting into a prestigious journal, researchers will try other tactics to coax others into reading and citing their work, and one such tactic is doing better research.

My main concern with abolishing journals is that the need for prestige in science wouldn't disappear overnight, and instead of trying to get into prestigious journals, to only way to get that prestige bonus will be to do the social climbing to associate yourself with prestigious researchers.

Even established, tenured scientists will often need to obtain grants and will still be judged by where they publish. Though there's also, of course, quite some institutional inertia and people just not caring, since it doesn't affect them personally. And of course, there are also a lot of (established) academics who do care.

One data point: we were 3 authors who worked for several months on a chapter of an authoritative book in our field. We got €100 to split. Of course, we get fuck all for our papers.

No. And most of the time, if you want a paper that's behind a paywall, email the corresponding author and they'd be delighted to know that someone on the planet actually cares, and then email you a pdf, copyright be damned.

Honestly, sci-hub is the best website of the last decade; I use it every day. It works better than the publishers' websites (that I have legitimate access to). It's just excellent. It's founder should be made a saint.

Many (most?) books through publishers don't earn out their advance which is probably low 4 figures in most cases. In practice, writing books is either a hobby or it's a reputational side-gig for you day job whether self-employed or employed by some organization.

The situation exists because it just evolved into what it currently is, and until recently no one seemed to care. Before the internet for example, it made a lot of sense for publishing to be handled by a private entity. There were real marginal costs to the production and distribution of journals and demand was relatively low.

Today this is very much changed. Demand is high and marginal costs are zero. So I imagine we will move towards an open access model.

Whenever I am being compared with my peers -- for raises, for possible grant funding, if I apply for a job at another university -- people will look at publication lists and see who has published in "good" journals.

And when you say that "prestigious journals are widely read" -- honestly, journals aren't really ever read as such. Researchers will look for individual papers they're interested in. The choice of journal is a signaling mechanism and little else.

It is true that universities want prestige... but, honestly, tenured faculty don't often care too much about what their employers want. What a panel at a granting agency thinks of my record, is more important than what my department chair and dean think.

Your idea that e.g. Stanford should order their faculty to publish on SciHub is an interesting one. For better or worse, university administrators don't tend to have or exercise much authority, and any attempt to order faculty to do anything is likely to be met with fierce resistance.

A university (and its faculty) sign a contract to publish only in open-access journals. But the contract doesn't actually go into effect until it has signatories of n% of top universities (ivies, UCs, etc).

Therefore, the awful transition (of an individual university being disadvantaged) can be alleviated. Once the contract goes into effect, the pressure is directed towards the other party: those who don't publish open access will need to justify it.

Unfortunately, if they have staff that also intend to, or should prepare for, working somewhere else after Stanford (which is very common in an academic career), then those are likely to revolt.

You could see this happen with the introduction of "Plan S" in many European countries, where researchers were afraid that "top" journals were no longer accessible to them and that that would hurt their standing in the field and future opportunities in, primarily, the US.

The two are one and the same. What you call "Universities" is simply "professors at the universities". Department policies for tenure are set by a bunch of professors. The dean of the college is always a professor. There's no "us" vs "them".

One might call it a mistake, but is remarkably suspicious that the spam regularly arrives exactly one year (to the day) after I most recently unsubscribed.

There are the financial aspects to their exploitation, but I guess this struck a nerve because it is scummy behavior that affects me more personally.

University administrators, grant-writing bodies, and others pressure professors and graduate students to publish with specific publishers. It is not because those publishers are more trustworthy; it is simply inertia, institutional tradition, and credentialism. It is the same attitude that leads some companies to turn away candidates who never completed a bachelor's degree. To give an example of just how bad this situation is, we sometimes hear complaints about people citing the IACR eprint version of a paper rather than the "officially published" version -- not because they are any different, nor because there is something better about the official version (in fact the eprint version typically includes details that are absent from the official copy), but simply because European universities use citation counts to judge professors and only consider citations of articles published by specific publishing companies.

Academic publishers have raised their fees even as their costs have greatly declined. The number of journals that are actually printed and distributed on paper has been shrinking, and the cost of distributing over the Internet is almost a rounding error. Yet in that same period of time the publishers have increased subscription fees to the point where some university systems could not justify paying for the subscription. These companies have outlived their usefulness and they know it -- now they are trying to extract as much money as they can before the business model completely fails.

>But they don't, and I think it's because they realize that . . .

They don't realize any such thing: they're just doing what benefits them personally (e.g., surviving as a professor or apprentice professor) at the expense of the broader ecosystem.

It is a problem of coordination: if the professors, students and the governments and foundations that fund research acted in unison (and were sufficiently informed and clear-thinking), then the entire academic literature would probably be available without restriction (like, e.g., Wikipedia is) on the internet by now.

Such an arrangement would satisfy the values of the professor, students, etc, better than the current system does. But it is hard to get there because it is hard for 10s of 1000s to act in unison.

Sure, it's not the publishers themselves that are de facto forcing researchers to publish with them, but they do make use of the fact that they're being put in a position of being a rent-seeker, and they lobby a lot to keep it that way.

Of course, the question is not "who's to blame?", but "how to change this"? And indeed, the publishers aren't too relevant to that question - it's the incentive structures that should change.

(Disclosure: I contribute to https://plaudit.pub, which aims to change these incentive structures.)

Sometimes it's crazy how incompetent reputable publishers are in academic publishing. The for-profit publisher of my forthcoming book has agreed to accept a LaTeX manuscript. It's written and almost camera-ready. But now they told me they don't really know how this works yet, and so the typesetter has to "open it and convert it" to something else, which will be "time-consuming." After three years, they suddenly changed their mind and want me to provide the manuscript in Word!

The copies on the author's pages and in open repositories are obliged to be pre-publication drafts, so you cannot cite them.

In fact, under control of large publishers journals have become fairly inventive about making pre-publication manuscripts unusable. For instance, I recently published in a prestigious journal that had an online editing system so that all final revisions stayed in the system - no author copy of any kind, every proof marked with author name and large watermarks -, and they made lots of small, sometimes unnecessary changes in the very last editing step. They also don't paginate the final versions that are published online first, so you can only know the real final pagination a year or so after the first version has been published online.

The designation that combinations of words are a form of property that can be owned, which then become assets naturally funneled towards those interested in playing the capital meta game and away from those doing the actual work.

To a scientist, the ability to copyright their paper is a vulnerability. Get rid of the concept of imaginary property and there is a lot less for Elsevier to demand from them.

Squeezing as much profit as possible for shareholders while externalising costs. It’s a poster child when you think about it!

A bearded man calls this "surplus". Scientific journal business is the pinnacle of capitalism, what every company strives to become, including the ones fellow HN people here work at and start up.

And what do you mean “gatekeeper”? It’s their journal and they created the impact factor, no?

Edit: Thank you for the replies.

They did indeed fund a highly successful research centre, but - importantly to its success - one that wasn't run with the same ideals as its parent. It wasn't Bell Labs itself that endeavoured to monopolise an entire industry to the point where the government had to intervene.

/s

Think you've misunderstood my point, this is without a doubt a fishing expedition for no real purpose.

Alexandra Elbakyan is already convicted and will be extradited the moment she steps outside the country, there's very likely sealed indictments waiting in the shadows too, the evidence for her crimes are overwhelming and without dispute by anyone.

Things like this are just another chance at a smear campaign, they really don't care about what laws have been broken now, that part is over, all they want is leverage.

Flashback 2 years:

> A former senior U.S. intelligence official said he believes Elbakyan is working with Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, the same organization that stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and then provided them to WikiLeaks in 2016.

As reported in the Washington Post and others. See how conveniently these two seemingly unrelated matters are being connected? Why would a respected newspaper go off on a segue like that?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191226/14393243638/acade...

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site in the intended spirit from now on? We'd be grateful.

No. If the other person has it enabled then your messages with them are stored by and readable by Apple no matter what your settings are.

What? If you back up your messages, don't you get the messages from your contacts? Why wouldn't they get yours?

This is untrue. I just restored an iCloud backup from my girlfriends account to an old iPhone. Our messages are included.

On my personal iCloud I have iMessage sync disabled and iCloud backups disabled. She has both enabled.

Ideals like:

"all people are created equal"

"government of the people, by the people, for the people"

"Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,"

"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."

That leaves the secondary function of encouraging creation. But turns out creation is not 'original' as people thought and having others works freely available encourages new works much more than promises of monetary gains.

This is a generally applicable answer: IP rights hold power worldwide mostly because the no.1 country that wants them has military and economic dominance over most of the planet.