Hacker News Reader

Comment by habitue | Hacker News Reader

While I'm pretty sure the legal theory being espoused here has no chance in court, the fact remains that what Sci-Hub is doing is a good thing. Hopefully in a few decades when we finally get sane copyright laws, or open access journals become the standard instead of the exception, we'll be able to look back on this differently.

For those saying "there are open access journals, you aren't forced to publish with Elsevier" you're wrong. If you want a PhD and they require publications, you publish where there is a tradition of publishing or it doesn't count. If you're looking for tenure, they care about the prestige of the journals you publish in. You can make a political statement if you're already tenured, but most don't have that luxury.

View on HN

Sure, people gotta publish where they gotta publish.

But nobody should review for closed access publications. Reviewing is a largely thankless task that has only marginal career benefits, aside from the first few times you do it.

That's the campaign we have to arrange. It's what will break the deadlock.

Doesn't this mean that the universities are in bed with the publishers which creates a closed loop around the scientific community and graduate students?

How can knowledge expect to flourish if the universities dictate where the papers go for maximal prestige and the publishers paywall the papers for maximal profit?

The universities are complicit in it, but as an individual, you have the option of making a protest after working hard to do the research itself, by not passing your thesis defense or getting tenure, and having a very small impact on publishing practices or you have the option of being complicit in it.

Over time, this can change, but right now the costs are very high to protest and the chance of it changing minds is very low.

I wonder if a possible solution to this problem would be getting universities to require publication to open access journals as opposed to closed ones. Then journals with paywalls would have an incentive to offer open access options in order to keep the largest amount of papers.

Research papers funded by US Government agencies that spend more than $100M on R&D requires that the papers be made publicly available within 1 year after publication. Unfortunately, this does not apply to works published before 2013. NIH has had this policy in place for longer, but it still doesn't go back far enough.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announce...

> If you want a PhD and they require publications, you publish where there is a tradition of publishing or it doesn't count.

Most PhD programs require a single publication. It's called a dissertation. Sometimes individual chapters are formatted with an eye towards publication in a particular journal, but I'm not aware of any program, at least in the biological sciences that requires journal publications to get a degree.

It's probably different in different fields. In CS it's common for the dissertation to be a compilation of several published papers

Sure, as long as you want no academic career after your doctorate. Most doctorate students I know start stressing if they have no publications by their second year. That includes multiple biology and chemistry grad students.

Some PhD programs (at least in Psychology) require a certain number of peer-reviewed journal articles. In some cases, the dissertation is just 3 or 4 journal articles linked together. It's completely up to the graduate program to decide what the requirements are for completing the PhD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com