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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

The way SciHub is being treated by governments is pretty infuriating. There's a tiny minority of people who have an interest in keeping SciHub off the internet, and they're generally neither the researchers who write the papers, nor those who want to read them. Despite this, the power of the state has been used repeatedly to keep SciHub inaccessible and limit their ability to get funding.

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SciHub is just one instance of the broader problem, which is that governments - even ostensibly democratic ones - don't actually operate in the best interests of the governed.

Which, I think, shouldn't be surprising when our "representatives" ostensibly speak for hundreds of thousands (and sometimes, millions) of people each. True democracy requires a much shorter and more direct chain of responsibility.

One thing that I think is being missed in this discussion is that governments have a responsibility to enforce the laws that are currently on the books. Perhaps more importantly, they also need to be seen to be enforcing them.

SciHub was allowed to operate freely for several years when it was relatively unknown, but to turn a blind eye to it now that it's received mainstream attention would threaten the credibility of the legal system.

I wholeheartedly support SciHub, but I can't blame governments for enforcing their laws. Ultimately, the changes need to happen at the legislative level to update copyright laws, and this somewhere where lobbying local representatives could have a meaningful impact.

Well, yes, there's people who actually enforce those laws, and there are people who write them. I was specifically referring to the latter. But both are a part of government as a system, and so ultimately the system as a whole carries the blame.

>SciHub is just one instance of the broader problem, which is that governments - even ostensibly democratic ones - don't actually operate in the best interests of the governed.

Agreed. This is true for virtually any human endevour. The average person out there can be easily manipulated by those who generally seek power. So I say that the root problem is one of that of people in their ability discern appropriate people to hold power. To make matters worse those who are most suited to govern often are not interested in taking on positions of power.

Yes, due to allocation of property rights.

Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.

> Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.

Historically academics have felt forced to support this system, because for-profit journals are the high-prestige ones they must publish in in order to get tenure. This has changed for certain fields, but it isn’t as simple as just suggesting that one publish elsewhere.

It’s up to not only academics who publish articles, but also organizations that issue grants and tenure. Public policies to adjust their definitions of “prestige” or “quality” would help.

And these are mostly run by people that have not even heard of scihub, openaccess etc

Case in point: The ARC, the biggest Australian Research funding body, recently explicitly banned the mention of preprints in grants. You can't include your own arxiv/biorxiv/etc. preprints in your grants to show your work! To the ARC, that's unpublished work. I know a few mathematicians who exclusively publish on arxiv who were bitten by this change, the whole grant got rejected.

That is... profoundly idiotic and short-sighted.

which fields has this changed for?

What are some of the fields where this is changing?

For some fields the for-profit problem never happened at all. For example, in some branches of linguistics, history and archaeology the main journals have always been published by the same non-profit learned societies for decades (since the 19th century, sometimes). Prices for the hardcopy were always reasonable, and with the digital era, these journals became open access.

In other branches of those disciplines, I have seen that recently some big-name editors have founded new open-access journals with the express aim of gradually taking prestige away from for-profit journals. See here [0] (PDF).

[0] https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cgi/viewcontent.c...

Sure, but it's a divide-and-conquer problem. Academics have to mutually support each other rather than trusting everything to a competitive marketplace (which most of them seem to hate anyway).

Stop supporting a system you won't inherit.

One can publish online a pre-print for free, which is very close to the final version of the paper.

In my personal opinion the international community could do something like modify the Berne Convention/TRIPS (international copyright agreements signed by almost every country/WTO members respectively) to exclude copyright of academic papers.

The property rights in question are not natural rights, nor material rights. Sufficient political will seems like it could do it.

Finding politicians in power who will support human progress before profits might be hard! [/understatement]

Give me tenure and I'm on board.

And often the papers they host were paid for with public money.

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