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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

I just wanted to take a moment to say what a lifechanging tool sci-hub has been for research. In doing research for a big writing project on Mars I ended up with a folder of maybe 800 scientific and technical papers, some of them dating back to 1910. This is material it would have been hard to collect even with access to a major university library. Online publishers, meanwhile, demand extortionate per-paper fees for access, including to papers that started in the public domain, or are long out of copyright. On sci-hub you can just find nearly all this stuff without any fuss—there were maybe 5 or 10 papers total that I had to find through other channels. Alexandra Elbakyan is an absolute legend for creating this tool, which is on a par with Wikipedia for usefulness and public benefit.

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I think I'm probably HN's most fervent copyright supporter, and I want to find a way to disapprove of Sci-Hub; it feels like cheating? Like sidestepping the real issue, of how journals are organized? But I can't take myself seriously trying to argue that. Even my kids, who are both practicing scientists at institutions with official access to all these papers, use Sci-Hub to get stuff.

May someone who supports the free sharing of Sci-Hub be the most fervent copyright supporter we have to convert.

Yar.

At one point I noticed I was grabbing a lot of papers from Astrobiology, and I thought, this is a cool journal, let me go subscribe.

They didn't even have a price list on the site. The only option was to give them your full contact info, and after I did they told me a sales representative would be call me on the phone to discuss pricing. That's the last time I felt any guilt about using Sci-Hub.

> Online publishers, meanwhile, demand extortionate per-paper fees for access

I just don’t understand how they can be so shameless about it. For instance, one single paper on Phys. Rev. Lett. costs $35 without a subscription. $35 for a few pages of PDF; ~100% margin for the publisher and the publisher alone. (And the publisher here, APS, is not-for-profit.) Who the fuck came up with this kind of pricing?

Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's dad.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

Lately the fringe theories that we live in a world run by absolutely perverted and demented psychos actively worshipping exploitation and sadism doesn't seem that far out when you start to connect the dots of who's who in the in the highest echelons.

Then they wash themselves with philanthropy and everyone praises them. The masses are easy to steer and have no interest in the esoteric power structures or foreign worldviews of the absolute elite.

Please stop repeating Russian conspiracy theories. Here in the Democratic west we have freedom and meritocracy. Not legal corruption and nepotism. Now please return to the latest woke outrage de jour /s.

In all serious the idea that the West is not profoundly corrupt in its own way is ludicrous.

Were it all went wrong is not clear. I'd say probably the first Gulf War era was an inflection point but not a start.

Perhaps the Kennedy Assassination or the literal defenestration of former Secretary of Defense Forestal.

Wow. Amazing article.

> Online publishers, meanwhile, demand extortionate per-paper fees for access, including to papers that started in the public domain, or are long out of copyright.

That these online publishers are able to rent collect for papers that are in the public domain, or long out of copyright, is an example of how broken our system is.

It's also an indictment of academic culture that they can't overcome their collective action problem. Of course, the important people in academia largely became that way because of the currency of the brands of the journals they published in. Giving up the fixation on status quo brands probably threatens in some way the power of status quo academics.

edit: academics are who we're supposed to depend on in order to organize and maintain ourselves as post-Enlightenment people, and they're somehow inextricably caught up in such a simple and open swindle. Even fully knowing the real consequences of locking away some stray piece of knowledge from the random asshole who will stumble upon a way to change the world with it.

I can get access to papers through my university, but even then there are many which lack subscription. And working from home, usually it is faster to just download the paper from sci-hub than go through a university login to get access.

I remember even using sci-hub for some 19th century papers, which are surely in the public domain...

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