Sci-Hub: knowledge as a human right
sci-hub.ru
sci-hub.ru
The journal business model is astounding: they charge a lot to publish, a lot to read what they publish, they do not pay reviewers, editors, or authors, and then get to claim ownership of what was published.
It's not enough for legislation to be "you must have some bs pseudo-open-access document", it should be "no employee of a publicly funded institution shall undertake unpaid labour for a journal, the journal must pay a minimum of 50% of proceeds to the author/institution, etc".
But with journals, there's nothing. It's 100% path dependence and coordination problems. No one would ever create this arrangement from scratch today.
And than Aaron hanged himself and Carl feels good and still sells his books, https://www.amazon.com/stores/Carl-Malamud/author/B000APW8Z0...?
This is a wonderful instructive almost biblical story.
I was in academia - the last one, post-academia - and it was (to me) understood that having peer review was at least a gatekeeper for releasing information that might be useful to or otherwise heeded by the public. Maybe.
Are there problems with that? Are the prices exceptionally high, especially for academic libraries (I recall that Tetrahedron Letters was on the order of $25K in 1995 for a subscription at UT-Austin)? Yes.
But I keep coming back to the standards involved with friendly, neutral, or hostile people vetting your work. It's a higher standard to reach than the free market will entertain, but there is a cost. Keep you on your toes.
The staff and editors need to be paid. Reprints - something from my generation, actual hard copies, some of those requiring color and not BW - cost money. It all costs money.
Do the authors get something in return? Yes. We get refereed journal article citations on our CVs, and that's invaluable.
Love the idea, wish there was a meeting in the middle.
This isn't a both sides issue, it's very clearly one sided because all the actual work is outsourced to free labor.
There's no reason to meet in the middle, these companies need to die off and distribution should be free and open.
This system only works because most/all academics are underwritten by the taxpayer, and are willing to put up with a pretty high level of exploitation.
I think the logical solution would be just to formalize the fact that taxpayers foot the bill. Make journal access free, earmark funds for editors and staff at universities or research institutions, then just pay that directly out of taxes. It would cost a lot less than the current solution, where the taxpayer pays the wages of the contributors (so the journal doesn't have to), then pays the massively bloated subscription fee, then doesn't even get access in the end.
Without sci-hub I would not be able to get access to a lot of them. A good example being this one https://sci-hub.ru/10.1109/TASE49443.2020.00032 which I could had no other option than pay an exorbitant amount of money to access https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9405312
I don't mind actually paying for things, but the prices they charge are insane. Especially for something were I there only thing I can see is a small footnote that just happens to make what I am interested in pop to the top of search results.
So science marches on but without public access to the full text articles all we have to go on are the usually low quality science journalism press releases.
Science in the rich countries perhaps, anyway. And if you're at a university.
Also, university researchers have been sharing their institutes' access to papers for ever. No university subscribes to all journals. 15 years ago it was quick email to your undergrad mate asking if their uni subscribes to a particular journal. I was at a top-10 ranked US eng school and this was the case. 25 years ago it was a call and a fax. Before then a photocopier.
exactly my entire point.
people inside the tower just do not understand, which is why scihub came from someone outside of it
:)))))
The scientific publishing industry is corrupt and needs to burn.
But you can't be a scientist without obtaining grant money. And publishing - particularly in top journals - is the major way to accomplish that.
Fine example: Newton needed an angel to get Principia Mathematica published. It was edited, paid-for and seen through press by Edmond Halley. (Halley was not rich. He was lucky that it sold.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120512123330/http://www-groups...
Technically, of course, you can be a scientist without involving yourself with all that, if you're independently wealthy and/or doing it as a hobby in addition to your main job. Science used to be done that way (e.g. by bored educated aristocrats), but I think we have a strong consensus that the world would be worse than the current situation if there would be a de facto limitation to doing science only by those who can self-fund it.
Clearly there are pros and cons to the current system as you’ve pointed out.
The problem is the likes of Elsevier and their outrageous profit margins.
We just need a better system for QA in general.
But editors surely are needed for purposes like, well, editing, and all the administrative tasks? They are at least as useful as the secretaries at your companies (i.e. very).
- The purpose of these nonprofit groups is to select submissions for peer review and acceptance to their "journal".
- The "journal" can be simply a website with a list of links to the arXiv. Hosting and serving the articles is optional.
Versions of this plan have already been successfully executed by academics, perhaps most famously in the editorial revolts against Elsevier's topology journals [1]. The associated nonprofits continue to operate the new open access journals successfully [2,3]. These organizations don't just outsource to arXiv, but you could if you were a group of busy academics who wanted to keep it as simple and lightweight as possible.
[1] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=442
[2] https://msp.org/
If not, how do you reconcile this belief with the right of scientists and publishers to sell their productive labor?
2. In many cases, publicly funded research is gated behind paywalls;
3. In many (most?) cases, peer reviewer are paid nothing or close to it.
4. Most researchers I know either use sci-hub, other so called illegal sources for papers, or ask the authors for a copy.
If you do not, then you atr only concerned about publishers. They dont pay scientists. They dont pay for researchm You support parasites.
I don’t understand copyright existing beyond a few years after publication, and I don’t understand how a “right” to a work can be sold. It seems to be a system designed to facilitate wealth extraction rather than value creation.
The scientists have a right to sell their labour, not to own observed facts.
You can pay people to do science on an hourly basis just fine
A lot of the papers on SciHub are uploaded by the authors, because they aren't doing the research for the paltry royalties they receive.
As many others in the thread have said - the profits from the paper paywalls go to the publishers, reviewing is done by volunteers.
As an aside, it's funny how often defenders of intellectual slavery are so dug in to their beliefs while being completely unaware of the mechanisms of what they're defending. I suppose such ignorance is a necessary precondition to support such injustice.
What's stopping scientists from just not publishing in those for-profit journals? I mean, it's their paper.
Journals also often require that you assign copyright to them and restrict your ability to publish in more accessible places.
I mean, of course none of us like them, and everyone hates the pressure that you have to publish papers to keep your job or to be promoted. But all these are independent to how the industry makes money and especially very irrelevant to the fact that most of journals aren't open-access.
Almost all universities/institutions have subscriptions of majority of journals. And most "proper" journals don't charge you (the authors) a fee to publish. Yes, they usually don't pay you when they asked you to review, which sucks. But the whole thing isn't as bad from a practical perspective. Again it's still a annoyance from time to time, just not that bad.
Furthermore, unfortunately, a way to judge how good you're at research would be needed anyway. If the journal publishing industry died overnight, there would be other metric coming up and as toxic.
TL;DR: scientific publishing industry is a leech but they leech on the fact scientists/researchers needing a way to build their prestige. Not on them directly. That's why most don't have a too strong opinion or act on it.
I've not noticed this in biology. Most journals charge a couple thousand to publish. The only exception I can think of are the plos journals. And they also never ever pay you to review.
In engineering, at least as far as I encountered, only some shady journals would charge you.
Since there's no planet B and also no planet A sooner than later, we should put ourselves in the position to be able to move to a terraformed Mars or in temporary Dyson spheres as soon as possible.
These types of projects ("Shoulders of giants" all the way down) make me hopeful for the future of humanity.
Thank you Alexandra Elbakyan!
Calling Musk to prove he's a real philanthropist and buy out the entire scientific publishing industry!
"AE: Although the Soviet Union collapsed, the communist ideology remained strong, so I grew up in an environment where communism was still an inspiring idea. Hence, I always understood Sci-Hub as a communist project. The first version of Sci-Hub even had a small hammer and a sickle on the website, and if you hovered a mouse over it, text would pop up stating, “The communist society…is based upon common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption”
Knowledge today has become the private property of corporations such as the publisher Elsevier. These corporations are making a lot of money, while researchers are poor and exploited. Sci-Hub is against all of this. Knowledge belongs to everyone and all people should have equal access to it. Sci-Hub is fighting for communism in science."
"Why Stalin is God"[1] is the most marked example; e.g. "He [Stalin] created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG.", or "Someone may disagree by saying: there was a censorship in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible to say anything against Stalin - therefore everyone loved him. However, we must admit: the censorship was done by the people - there must be someone who sends you to prison if you don't love Stalin. Stalin obviously couldn't do this himself, on the contrary, that was done by other people for Stalin, because he was loved very strongly."
I'm not even going to spend time addressing this nonsense; it should be obvious to everyone with knowledge of Stalin Russia what's wrong with this. This article is an apologetic for evil. Sci-Hub is used as apologetics for evil. I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub.
I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers.
I know everyone here loves Sci-Hub, and I like the idea of it too. Everyone can make their own decision based on this, but for me, personally, I find it hard to support a site that explicitly defends evil in such a way.
Ugh, there are no "political ideas" here. Why does western culture always insist on viewing everything through political or ideological lens? You realise that you are literally the only ones who does that? No one else is that bothered with proper virtue signalling at the expense of objectivity.
> apologetics for evil
You're reasoning in childish categories. It's not what is going on here.
> I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub.
Sci-Hub IS her own website, deal with it.
> I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers.
Why do "people's responses" even matter here? Objective reality exists in the synergy of cause-effect relations. I don't know that your "knowledge of Stalin Russia" (which in itself is a factual error, it's "Stalin's USSR") is, but denying the historical fact that he had a personality cult (which just by definition imples enough love) is just as dishonest as denying that Hitler was loved and supported in Europe and in the US for a long time, not in the least for his antagonism towards the above-mentioned USSR. The fact that they were genocidal mass-murdurers does not eject them from history and context directly into the vacuum. Even if it upsets some people who love to pinpoint all the blame to "a single evil person", despite that history would have just as well produced someone similar given the circumstance if the above-mentioned evil person didn't exist. It's just an assessment of a historical process, nothing more.
Capitalism can take many forms and is often tempered with more socialist policies. No country – including the United States" is "pure capitalist". China has its own spin on capitalism, but that doesn't make it not-capitalism.
The PRC never embraced free markets, transitioning from state capitalism to something closer to fascist-style corporatism.
Communist economies are about the opposite of free enterprise.
Capitalism is its own purely economic animal, perhaps directly opposed to a communist economy, but not the opposite of a communist government.
Really capitalism is not conceptully supposed to be a form of government to begin with, but it can snuggle up to any government from democracy to communism to monarchy and anything in between.
And there you go.
As an "ism" capitalism has been with us since prehistoric times, any actual governance it accomplishes is effectively done by the different types of political systems it has operated with, that have come and gone over the millennia.
Sometimes the strength of the capital is greater than the resources or political will of the government in power at the time, sometimes not. Debt can distort this balance.
As we have seen.
The free riders here are the middlemen who take their pound of flesh and hide almost everything behind paywalls and expensive subscriptions.
They not only get free content from the authors, free labor from the reviewers.
They get to charge the readers but also THE FREAKING AUTHORS for their submissions.
Scientists are not obligated to publish in journals at all.
Much the same way you’ll voluntarily do something when someone who holds a position of power over you asks you to do something.
As numerous other people have pointed out, there is no small amount of career advancement riding on the back of being published in a journal. Until the culture of publish-or-perish can be removed from universities and publishers can be removed from their position as rent-seeking parasites, this dynamic will continue.
Fundamentally there’s no difference than say bootstrapping a company or seeking investment.
Yes, "publish or perish" technically provides two options. ;-)
But it would be nice to see Elsevier and its ilk replaced with true open access journals (without open access fees), and for everything to be available on arxiv.org or similar sites.