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The Robin Hood of Science
- dang 11y agoAlthough we just had https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070192, this article appears to give more information, so we won't treat it as a dupe.
- entee 11y agoNo question scientific publishers are effectively a racket. The problem is that as a researcher you're stuck. If you want tenure, you need a publication in a big journal. There are a few that are open access in some domains, notably biology, but even there Plos Biology et. al. doesn't quite have the cachet of Nature/Science/Cell. In other fields, it can be even harder to find a good open access solution. In chemistry for example, I can't think of one. You can pay to have ACS or other publishers make something open access, but that's more money out a researcher's pocket that's not going toward better science. Sure, publishing has costs, but nowhere near what gets charged. Also, much of the labor of reviewing papers is also provided to publishers free of charge, scientists review each other's work for no fee before acceptance in a journal that will charge dearly for it. We as tax payers pay for this work, the people we pay to do it are caught in a catch-22 situation where they can either hand over their work to someone who will charge an arm and a leg, or be pushed out of science.
- greeneggs 11y agoThe researchers deserve some of the blame as well. In physics, at least, and certainly in some other fields, there is a strong tradition of posting preprints to the arXiv or other similar free archives. The journals, including all the top journals, accommodate this---they have no choice. You mention chemistry. I don't know anything about chemistry journals, but given the precedent set by other fields, I feel that chemists don't have a good excuse for locking their research up behind paywalls.
- ylem 11y agoSome chemistry journals do not allow you to publish if you place a copy on a preprint server like arxiv. The key to this battle will be funding agencies.
- rdancer 11y agoPaywalls are a nuisance. Failures of peer review, lack of reproducibility, and political bias are some of the real problems. Scientists and the institutions that support them must work towards solving these problems. Nobody is going to do that for them. A good first step would be to start acknowledging that the practice of science is as political as any other important human endeavour, and not some impartial objective selfless oracle. Step two could be finding solutions based on this new admission.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- biehl 11y agoLegacy science publishers are one of the best examples of copyright fail - how times have changed such that the current rules are no longer aligned with reasonable goals of current society.
- jakub_h 11y agoExpected LibGen. Was not disappointed.
- dredmorbius 11y agoWell, SciHub isn't LibGen, though they're similar in concept. I believe SciHub used to be accessible through LibGen, but the latter has been flattened a bit.
- jakub_h 11y agoTrue, but there's a strong connection mentioned in the article.
- nycthbris 11y agoIsn't this effectively what Aaron Swartz got in trouble for?
- mirceal 11y agomore or less yes.
- Forbo 11y agoExcept I don't think he actually released any of the documents he was collecting. So what Aaron was doing was far less condemnable. This is just out-right disregard for the copyright law. And I love it.
- rdancer 11y agoHe got in trouble for hacking in his own country. Something the author of this project wisely avoids.
- gaius 11y agoBreaking and entering? No.
- beloch 11y agoWhile at university, you just take having free access to journals for granted. When you leave academia the withdrawal hits you. A lot of journals will make an article free if the author pays extra. (For those unfamiliar with how journals work, you submit your work, they get other scientists to review it for them for free, and then they charge you to publish it if the reviewers are all happy enough). The result of this practice is that you don't automatically know if an article will be possible to view or not. You can't just say, "Oh that's in Journal X, there's no point in looking it up because it won't be free". You have to check and be randomly denied! The effect of this is that you can no longer freely follow the rabbit hole of an interesting chain of references, nor will you read articles outside your bailiwick for fun because they popped up on a blog somewhere. Even if you carefully restrict the journals you're interested in reading, subscriptions will total several thousand per year. Single articles will be priced at $40-50, which is just nuts when you're reading for curiosity. Even if it pertains to your job, it's a chore to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to make your company pay for it. The end result is that, once you leave university, you're cut off from legally obtaining access to a lot of interesting stuff. How does restricting knowledge in this manner serve science or industry? In physics, arxiv is pretty freakin' awesome... for recent stuff. If you're following a reference chain, you go off the reservation pretty darned quick. I admit, I've been guilty of using some slightly more labor intensive means of obtaining articles without paying for them, but it's a pain. I honestly hope somebody succeeds in making all of history's scientific publications freely and easily available online in a very permanent way. Hell, that research was practically all funded with public money anyways! Why should private companies like Elsevier be collecting money for research Schrödinger conducted on the public dime before anyone alive was born? Sci-Hub is new to me, but it looks promising. This is something the world needs.
- chockablock 11y agoIt's not a complete solution, but you can walk in to many public university libraries without needing to have a university affiliation and use their computers to read/print articles and/or go find the print copy of many journals. At the UCSF libraries here in San Francisco you can walk in off the street and browse the stacks and use the photocopiers without showing any ID. You can also use a workstation for one 2h session/day for free to access online journals and databases. You can also pay $100/yr for borrowing privileges (up to 5 items at a time). https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/computing/policies_public_computer https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/computing/policies_pub... https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/borrowing/privileges https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/borrowing/privileges
- mighty-fine 11y agoIs it possible for anyone who wants to to just mirror the entire database? How big is it anyway?
- hyperion2010 11y agoIf each article weighs in at 1mb (probably an overestimate) then 1mil papers weighs about 1Tb, so for their currently reported 47mil papers you are looking worst case at 50Tb. If we assume they have about 50% coverage (which seems reasonable base on this article [0]) then 100Tb total under the 1mb avg. I'm guessing that number is quite high because the true average will be significantly less than 1mb and compression could bring it down even more. 0. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doubles-every-nine-years.html http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-outpu...
- KKKKkkkk1 11y agoI applaud what sic-hub is doing, but am curious why doesn't Elsevier simply block the IPs that sci-hub is using. I imagine that once a university gets blocked, whoever shared their credentials at that university will get similar treatment to what Aaron Swartz experienced. I for one would never take that kind of risk.
- dredmorbius 11y agoNumerous journals offer access to researchers, campuses, etc., through various systems. These are either individually authenticated, or are offered through campus-wide systems. My understanding is that Sci-Hub works through "donated" access -- either credentials or inside-the-firewall systems -- through which it can request papers. There are other options for feeding papers into the system as well, and once they're inside, they're then available. Given that most disciplines tend to have a few highly-cited papers, and a standard Zipf / Power curve, starting with the most relevant papers and working down will get you a lot of coverage. You've still got to keep up with new publications, but that's tractable. Elsevier would have to deny access to entire academic institutions, or highly-placed researchers. Given they're already in a hot seat, that's a risky proposition.
- nycticorax 11y agoI don't want to defend Elsevier, but this article was just egregiously one-sided. Surely an article like this should examine whether this model is sustainable, or what it would really mean if these for-profit publishers disappeared. (Some of them, for instance, employ full-time editors to sift through papers and pick the best ones. How does this sifting happen in the brave new world of universal free access?) Also they quote "Robin Hood" thus: "Elsevier, in contrast, operates by racket: If you do not send money, you will not read any papers." Ummm, that's how most businesses work. If you want a sandwich, you have to pay for it first... Not all businesses are rackets. "Robin Hood" continues... "On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why can Elsevier not work like this, I wonder?" Ummm, because they're a for-profit company, and their officers have a obligation to try to maximize profit for their share-holders? Again, I don't want to defend Elsevier, but I think a better article would have acknowledged that there's more than one side to this issue.
- stephenboyd 11y agoI wouldn't fault an opinionated blog post for trying to make a persuasive argument. Why should the author pretend to be a pseudo-objective newspaper journalist and mix in Elsevier's talking points? This is seems to be written with the reasonable assumption that the reader is aware of the academic journal publishing reform movement and its opponents.
- reality_czech 11y agoIf you don't want to defend Elsevier, then don't. The research was paid for with our tax dollars. The public has a right to read it. The academics who write and review the papers are not paid by Elsevier. The only value Elsevier provides is choosing which papers to accept, and organizing physical printing of the articles. A committee of prestigious academics in a particular field could easily choose a few leading papers to accept each month, and run a web server with some PDFs... and in some fields, that's what's starting to happen.
- foldr 11y ago> A committee of prestigious academics in a particular field could easily choose a few leading papers to accept each month, and run a web server with some PDFs. This is a little naive. Running a good journal takes a lot of time and effort (not to mention a little bit of money).
- bainsfather 11y agoThe website is: sci-hub.io searching for scihub returned results for other organisations. Anyone use it much? How complete is it? I just tried it and got the nature paper about deepmind's go playing program, which was nice.