A note on recent content takedowns | Hacker News Reader

A note on recent content takedowns

researchgate.net

77 pointsEvgeniyZh19 comments

I'm one of the researchers whose had a paper removed. Confusingly, it was the 'accepted manuscript' version, which Elsevier explicitly states you may share [0]. It's very obviously watermarked too, by their own editorial management system. It's very frustrating that you can do everything right by the publisher and still lose like this.

[0] https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing

*Edit: typo

The policy link lists, in some detail, how and where you may share your accepted manuscript—for example, on arxiv. I would not interpret their criteria to include Researchgate.

I think you're right. I've double checked their FAQ, which states that you can upload your preprint to Researchgate, but then they only explicitly mention arxiv for swapping the preprint with the accepted manuscript. I guess I'll just have to swap over to arxiv.

For the benefit of those who haven't submitted a manuscript before: the accepted version is just the preprint with improvements from the peer review process - and no "other publisher value-added contributions such as copy-editing, formatting, technical enhancements and (if relevant) pagination". Assuming the associate editor is a volunteer (true for the journal in question), Elsevier's only in-kind contribution at this point is their awful submission system, and the Chief editor's time in accepting the associate editor's decision... although the chief editor might also be a volunteer.

And since the formatting is probably already done by the author with TeX, and (in my experience) the copy editing done by scientific journals usually makes the paper worse, there's not much “value-add” here.

I have no sympathy for researchgate. They syphon papers, they used black patterns early on to mass-send emails to invite people on the platform. And finally, as a researcher, I never found researchgate to be actually useful.

There's no denying the site itself is a bit shady, most of my IP addresses are blocked. I find myself using researchgate hosted full text pdfs pretty regularly the last handful of years. At least a few times a month.

This is far better than there being no pdfs at all. I don't really care about how researchgate tries to run their site beyond this.

But at least there's the network effect of getting access to papers, which is more than you can say about most social networks.

Gonna come out and say it: science is broken in many many ways currently, but it won't be unbroken until publishing is 100% freely available, both the authors and the readers. SciHub is doing it right, and people putting SciHub content on IPFS are doing it Right, because that puts the burden on everyone, not just a handful of individuals.

It should become good taste for universities to pin & seed as much of the global science corpus as possible on distributed systems, and it would also make sense for them since it would allow immediate fast and uncomplicated access to anyone within their networks (vicinity).

Scientific publication is broken but honestly I doubt that’s the reason science itself is broken. Before the advent of the internet you had access to the journals in your library and pretty much that’s it. If you wanted any other reference you had to do an ILL. Or write to the authors and wait for months. People obviously did great amazing science, much better than what’s being done today.

I used to live in a third world country where access to articles was abysmal (pre scihub) and honestly that was like the 10th biggest problem I had with doing good science. If you’re smart and you want to learn something you will find a way. Money is not the same thing, and neither are ideas. You can’t just will your way to those things.

Again, I am happy scihub exists and support it fully, but that’s honestly not solving the real problem with science.

Maybe I should've been more clear that it is one of the problems that need to be solved. "Solving publishing is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to fix science as a system."

There's still room for disagreement here ofc, but at least that should make my point clear. :)

Everyone is already free to publish their work on the Internet. Not sure if the publishing model by itself is the core issue, or the science funding model at large. A symptom is the fetishisation of peer review as a gatekeeping mechanism, which I think is what you decry. Peer review is driven by the need of funding agencies to have some roughly objective criteria for personnel selection. Publish or perish. While it is not an ideal tool, I have a hard time coming up with a better alternative.

Fundamentally science is about creating models of the world that are independently verifiable through experiment. Peer review inhabits an uncomfortable middle ground. While it serves a positive function in checking for methodological issues, it is only a distant proxy for independent experiments and is often prone to authority and group think.

I'm always a bit ambiguous about researchgate because it seems like it's replacing one walled garden with another one. I'd much rather see this kind of thing develop in on open and non-profit websites, as is already the case in many verticals.

Back when I was a student, I never like ResearchGate: they forced you to create an account, then upload some random rubbish PDFs just to get credits to download what you want.

The only few times I’ve thanked RG is when an obscure PDF was no longer on the university or author’s website by RG had a copy cancelling out the link rot.

Other than those few times, I’ve never found it useful.

Truth, I think I only used them one or twice to download some papers with attractive names that couldn't be found anywhere. It turned out the papers were quite bad, I figured they wouldn't be so hard to find otherwise.

> But these most recent requests were notable because of the number of articles involved. Although privately stored files were not affected, the demands by Elsevier and ACS resulted in the removal of around 200,000 public files. In the context of a community of over 20 million researchers this is unfortunate, rather than existential, but it has sparked an acute reaction from many of our members who believe in the importance of open science.

Wow, that's a staggering number of files.

It's good to hear that other publishers, such as Springer Nature and Wiley, are embracing a more open, syndicated publishing model with ResearchGate at least.

It's particularly staggering because it's unlikely they've correctly verified the status of all 200k, and are just dumping out a database query. (Whenever one checks these things, it typically turns out that many are actually CC or otherwise Open Access, PD because federal government work, preprints permitted to be shared, etc.)

One wonders if they sent Researchgate a DMCA and thus have perjured themselves countless thousands of times, and why Researchgate is rolling over?

I have a naive question.

Am I only able to get the paper free by asking the researcher (assuming all others are behind paywalls) which is being enforced by some form of legal language?

For example, say I post a link to my research paper alongside a presentation I gave associated to the work (let's say it's sitting on GitHub).

Is there typically language to prevent this?

I’ve been thinking about how the existence of sites like this and SciHub might actually prolong the life of paywalled sites.

See, when a scientist publishes an article, their academic success is partially judged by how many people cite their article. If everyone stopped citing articles that were owned by shitty companies, researchers would be disincentivized from publishing there. But when someone puts it also to SciHub the researcher still gets the H-index stats

https://libguides.bc.edu/articleinfluence/hindex

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