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This is all about violating a license/copyright law. If we were talking about a large company using GNU/copyleft code and not sharing their changes back to the

This is all about violating a license/copyright law. If we were talking about a large company using GNU/copyleft code and not sharing their changes back to the community, many people in the community would be demanding the law get involved (the Thesis Wordpress theme is a great example of this..which caused anger and outright hatred about 5 years ago in the HN community). It's really difficult for me to stand behind any community that doesn't put all licenses on an equal footing. If you want the government to stop going after you for copyright infringement, you shouldn't be then using those same tactics to go after people violating the terms of your license. This girl, Like Aaron Swartz, is nothing but a petty thief. It's pretty easy to put up a website with stolen papers/content. The other issue is that it takes millions of dollars to fund the research for many of these papers. With no incentive to make money on the research, companies will either stop the research, or it will go completely private and there will be no access for anyone. Many of these online revolutionaries really seem to understand how the world actually works. If you want to change it, start a research company and actually do the research yourself.

Thriptic 11y ago
> The other issue is that it takes millions of dollars to fund the research for many of these papers. With no incentive to make money on the research, companies will either stop the research, or it will go completely private and there will be no access for anyone. Most of the basic research being published is government funded and is conducted by universities or other academic entities, not companies. The publishing companies (Elsevier) aren't conducting any of the research; for the most part they are simply hosting manuscripts.
- pink_dinner 11y ago
  There are many thousands of papers on this website. You can't tell me all of them are government funded. Even so, it will not change the system. It will only make it more difficult to conduct research in the future.
  - Thriptic 11y ago
    > Even so, it will not change the system. It will only make it more difficult to conduct research in the future. I don't see why. If anything it is in the academics' best interest to have their papers show up on this service as it increases access and probability of citation. Also please explain how more ready access to information hinders research. You are aware that academics make 0 dollars off of content submitted to journals right? 100% of the profits go to the publishers.
    - sndean 11y ago
      > If anything it is in the academics' best interest to have their papers show up on this service as it increases access and probability of citation. Most people I know (myself included) are very happy to see most of their papers on sci-hub. We couldn't care less about how people find them, as long as they're cited. > You are aware that academics make 0 dollars off of content submitted to journals right? And yes, in fact, in my field, publishing costs ~$2500 per paper. More if it's open-access.
  - revelation 11y ago
    You seem to legitimately misunderstand this, so let's make this very very clear: of all the thousands of papers on that website, the publisher aka Elsevier and others had no part in the actual research, they have not funded the research, they have in fact very likely taken money from the very researchers.
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    > You can't tell me all of them are government funded. The majority are. A minority (<<1% to ~30% depending on field) were (also) funded by private grants and industry. In all three cases, the institution funding the research will receive 0 compensation from the journal if you pay $30+ for a paper. It all goes to the journal and its 40%+ profit margin. "But why don't competing journals steal their business?" Because the top few journals are the de-facto clearinghouses and ratings-providers for academics. If you are an academic who values his career, you will pay what they ask.
  - x1798DE 11y ago
jdbernard 11y ago
Calling Aaron Swartz "nothing but a petty thief" is a bit too dismissive. This is not a black-and-white issue. For example, many times the millions of dollars used to fund the research were given by governments and grant organizations: public entities.
- pink_dinner 11y ago
  "Calling Aaron Swartz "nothing but a petty thief" is a bit too dismissive." He's not a hero. Not even close. He was caught breaking into university computers and taking files that were not his. Most accounts of him were high-strung and when he didn't get his way? A petulant child. He seems like a nightmare to work with at Reddit and pretty much told everyone to fuck off that didn't agree with him. The fascinating thing is that his behavior sounds just like Donald Trump. Only..it's acceptable because his views match with many of the people in the community. "many times" Like I said above, this isn't all. You can't guarantee that not all of the documents in question were not funded by private entities. Research may be funded by the government, but those universities many times outsource it to private companies (and they pay workers to complete it). Everyone gets hurt in the process. It's just sad the dogma and the cult of personality have to be so pervasive on HN.
  - bloaf 11y ago
    >Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states. A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples. A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." The rule of law is generally good for humanity. Defending it is fine. But you need to remember that the law is a messy human undertaking that is subject to change, not an unassailable universal truth. People can break the law, and still be in the right. What people like Swartz and the folks at Sci-Hub are doing is making the judgement call that free access to scientific information provides a benefit to humanity that outweighs the cost of breaking the laws keeping the information restricted. Scientists-the people generating the content in question-tend to agree. There is no doubt that the publishers will have the lawyers on their side, but I've always thought that to be the weakest of endorsements. >There, where the state ceaseth—there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody. http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11 http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11
nefitty 11y ago
To quote the Big Lebowski, "Donny, you're out of your element." Publishers like Elsevier and Taylor & Francis pay nothing to acquire research papers, or for the volunteer peer reviews and edits. These companies have 30% profit margins. They are basically flipping a product back to the people who created it and need it, with literally almost no value add. They claim to be curators of content, but at the point we're at with the internet that role can be distributed. Our tax dollars also paid for a lot of the research locked up behind these paywalls. I'm sure you knew your comment about Alexandra Elbakayan being a "petty thief" was going to be contentious. We went through this with Aaron Swartz already. Try looking at the depths of her position before you start supporting a position that drove a young man to suicide. Edited for rhetorical stylings
- dang 11y ago
  > "Shut the fuck up Donny, you're out of your element." > really fucking pissed me off Please don't do this here. If you're "really fucking pissed off" by a bad or unfair comment, wait until you can post something civil. Otherwise the signal/noise ratio gets worse and we end up with a flamewar.
  - nefitty 11y ago
    Got it mate. It's just my style, but I will keep your suggestion in mind in the future.
    - dang 11y ago
      Thanks, we appreciate it. It's a style that works fine in many contexts (I always think of rugby players who beat the crap out of each other and then go out drinking together), but on large internet forums it acts the way salt does on a slug.
michaelbuddy 11y ago
A "petty thief" he says. I'm thinking you don't know what petty means. "Petty" would be the exact opposite. Just for the sake of argument, let's say she's a thief. The theft here is for the purpose of freeing up science around the world instead of it being locked away by people who didn't even contribute to the science. In many cases, the science is publicly funded. So freeing this information is not petty, in many ways it's selfless and honorable if you look at what can be done with it. A 'petty' thief would be somebody who rips out some of the copper from your home creating thousands in damage just to make a measly $10 from it, which could have been easily earned, possibly for less work and less time. That's selfish and petty. get it troll?
- dang 11y ago
  We've asked you before to stop posting political rants to HN. You've continued to do that, and here you've added a personal attack. We ban people for doing these things, so please don't keep doing them.
  - michaelbuddy 11y ago
    oh it's an attack to call someone a troll who attacked the subject in the story?? And how is my "rant" here political? Do you want discourse or not?
lolidaisuki 11y ago
You can think of it as theft if you accept that science should be done behind closed doors. Many people think that scientific discoveries belong to everyone.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
wolfgke 11y ago
> This is all about violating a license/copyright law. If we were talking about a large company using GNU/copyleft code and not sharing their changes back to the community, many people in the community would be demanding the law get involved Companies: not sharing their changes back to the community Publishers: not sharing the papers with everyone willing to do research I see a parallel...
pixelman32 11y ago
Scientific journals don't necessarily fund research, and groups who fund research don't necessarily benefit from proceeds from journal subscriptions. Funding scientific research isn't as simple as, say, funding startups. A vast majority of scientific research, especially basic research, yields no returns on investment. The real issue people have with the way journals work is that they seemingly don't provide a great deal of value. Imagine if GitHub worked like a science journal: You would submit your code to GitHub. They might have someone do a code review or run some tests to assure a baseline level of quality. Then they would lock your repository and charge anyone who wanted to see more than just the readme file $30 - $50. All of the proceeds from that go directly to GitHub. You, the author of the repository, get nothing. A software developer simply would not tolerate this model, but it's the norm in science.
jostmey 11y ago
Having participated in the publishing process, I firmly believe the actions of this girl are justified. When what is legal no longer aligns with what is right, the law must change, or else it becomes a joke.
andrepd 11y ago
>The other issue is that it takes millions of dollars to fund the research for many of these papers. With no incentive to make money on the research, companies will either stop the research, or it will go completely private and there will be no access for anyone. You seem to be basically misunderstanding the whole thing. This isn't about research funding, it's about publisher fees. The issue with the papers is not that they take money to produce and so the researchers then charge money for others to see the results, and that therefore bypassing these fees would deprive the researchers of their hard-earned money they need to keep funding their million dollar research. That is not at all what this is about. The fees being charged are publisher fees, absolutely ridiculous fees for a minimal service that is completely obsolete in the internet age, hampers collaboration and the flow of information, slows down science, prevents underprivileged persons from accessing the research that is in the vast majority of cases publicly funded, and serves only to give money to these publishers, of which absolutely 0% goes to the researchers themselves.
- pink_dinner 11y ago
  "The fees being charged are publisher fees, absolutely ridiculous fees for a minimal service that is completely obsolete in the internet age, hampers collaboration and the flow of information, slows down science, prevents underprivileged persons from accessing the research that is in the vast majority of cases publicly funded" So we should be able to do whatever we want when we don't agree with a law? this is between publishers and researchers. "and serves only to give money to these publishers, of which absolutely 0% goes to the researchers themselves." This sounds like the 'all music should be shared and free' argument all over again. The last decade of Napster and Torrents have pretty much destroyed any chances of an Indy musician to make a living without the sponsorship of a big corporation. It essentially pushed all of the Indy artists out. They actually had a chance to make a living with music before file sharing became part of our culture (and the belief that bits on a computer should somehow be free since it takes nothing to copy them). The irony is that the exact same thing is happening with job outsourcing and now those same people are clamoring for government intervention. We somehow need to stop the free flow of information when it directly affects your job. I worked in academia in a different life and nearly all research is conducted in some part by private entities pumping money into the University. This won't have the desired effect and will essentially make research even more private. I don't believe the GNU is a truly free license. If I decided to take software, use it in a proprietary app, and then sell it with no source, I would be taken to court (and people here on HN would want me sued out of existence (I've seen it many times already)). Should I have a right to do this? Because this is exactly what is going on here. A copyright license is being broken and you believe it's justified.
SCAQTony 11y ago
The handle "Pink Dinner" was created 15-days ago; about the time Alexandra Elbakyan hit the news hard. If you view the comments posted by this user one might consider them agenda driven toward this sort of topic? ... YMMV
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Let's assume good faith. Unless the profile's deleted a bunch of prior pro-Elsevier pieces and filled in a bunch of others, primary evidence doesn't look exceedingly shill-like.

Thriptic 11y ago

pink_dinner 11y ago
There are many thousands of papers on this website. You can't tell me all of them are government funded. Even so, it will not change the system. It will only make it more difficult to conduct research in the future.
- Thriptic 11y ago
  > Even so, it will not change the system. It will only make it more difficult to conduct research in the future. I don't see why. If anything it is in the academics' best interest to have their papers show up on this service as it increases access and probability of citation. Also please explain how more ready access to information hinders research. You are aware that academics make 0 dollars off of content submitted to journals right? 100% of the profits go to the publishers.
  - sndean 11y ago
    > If anything it is in the academics' best interest to have their papers show up on this service as it increases access and probability of citation. Most people I know (myself included) are very happy to see most of their papers on sci-hub. We couldn't care less about how people find them, as long as they're cited. > You are aware that academics make 0 dollars off of content submitted to journals right? And yes, in fact, in my field, publishing costs ~$2500 per paper. More if it's open-access.
- revelation 11y ago
  You seem to legitimately misunderstand this, so let's make this very very clear: of all the thousands of papers on that website, the publisher aka Elsevier and others had no part in the actual research, they have not funded the research, they have in fact very likely taken money from the very researchers.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  > You can't tell me all of them are government funded. The majority are. A minority (<<1% to ~30% depending on field) were (also) funded by private grants and industry. In all three cases, the institution funding the research will receive 0 compensation from the journal if you pay $30+ for a paper. It all goes to the journal and its 40%+ profit margin. "But why don't competing journals steal their business?" Because the top few journals are the de-facto clearinghouses and ratings-providers for academics. If you are an academic who values his career, you will pay what they ask.
- x1798DE 11y ago

jdbernard 11y ago

Calling Aaron Swartz "nothing but a petty thief" is a bit too dismissive. This is not a black-and-white issue. For example, many times the millions of dollars used to fund the research were given by governments and grant organizations: public entities.

pink_dinner 11y ago
"Calling Aaron Swartz "nothing but a petty thief" is a bit too dismissive." He's not a hero. Not even close. He was caught breaking into university computers and taking files that were not his. Most accounts of him were high-strung and when he didn't get his way? A petulant child. He seems like a nightmare to work with at Reddit and pretty much told everyone to fuck off that didn't agree with him. The fascinating thing is that his behavior sounds just like Donald Trump. Only..it's acceptable because his views match with many of the people in the community. "many times" Like I said above, this isn't all. You can't guarantee that not all of the documents in question were not funded by private entities. Research may be funded by the government, but those universities many times outsource it to private companies (and they pay workers to complete it). Everyone gets hurt in the process. It's just sad the dogma and the cult of personality have to be so pervasive on HN.
- bloaf 11y ago
  >Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states. A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples. A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." The rule of law is generally good for humanity. Defending it is fine. But you need to remember that the law is a messy human undertaking that is subject to change, not an unassailable universal truth. People can break the law, and still be in the right. What people like Swartz and the folks at Sci-Hub are doing is making the judgement call that free access to scientific information provides a benefit to humanity that outweighs the cost of breaking the laws keeping the information restricted. Scientists-the people generating the content in question-tend to agree. There is no doubt that the publishers will have the lawyers on their side, but I've always thought that to be the weakest of endorsements. >There, where the state ceaseth—there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody. http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11 http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11

nefitty 11y ago

To quote the Big Lebowski, "Donny, you're out of your element." Publishers like Elsevier and Taylor & Francis pay nothing to acquire research papers, or for the volunteer peer reviews and edits. These companies have 30% profit margins. They are basically flipping a product back to the people who created it and need it, with literally almost no value add. They claim to be curators of content, but at the point we're at with the internet that role can be distributed. Our tax dollars also paid for a lot of the research locked up behind these paywalls. I'm sure you knew your comment about Alexandra Elbakayan being a "petty thief" was going to be contentious. We went through this with Aaron Swartz already. Try looking at the depths of her position before you start supporting a position that drove a young man to suicide. Edited for rhetorical stylings

dang 11y ago
> "Shut the fuck up Donny, you're out of your element." > really fucking pissed me off Please don't do this here. If you're "really fucking pissed off" by a bad or unfair comment, wait until you can post something civil. Otherwise the signal/noise ratio gets worse and we end up with a flamewar.
- nefitty 11y ago
  Got it mate. It's just my style, but I will keep your suggestion in mind in the future.
  - dang 11y ago
    Thanks, we appreciate it. It's a style that works fine in many contexts (I always think of rugby players who beat the crap out of each other and then go out drinking together), but on large internet forums it acts the way salt does on a slug.

michaelbuddy 11y ago

A "petty thief" he says. I'm thinking you don't know what petty means. "Petty" would be the exact opposite. Just for the sake of argument, let's say she's a thief. The theft here is for the purpose of freeing up science around the world instead of it being locked away by people who didn't even contribute to the science. In many cases, the science is publicly funded. So freeing this information is not petty, in many ways it's selfless and honorable if you look at what can be done with it. A 'petty' thief would be somebody who rips out some of the copper from your home creating thousands in damage just to make a measly $10 from it, which could have been easily earned, possibly for less work and less time. That's selfish and petty. get it troll?

dang 11y ago
We've asked you before to stop posting political rants to HN. You've continued to do that, and here you've added a personal attack. We ban people for doing these things, so please don't keep doing them.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  oh it's an attack to call someone a troll who attacked the subject in the story?? And how is my "rant" here political? Do you want discourse or not?

lolidaisuki 11y ago

You can think of it as theft if you accept that science should be done behind closed doors. Many people think that scientific discoveries belong to everyone.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

wolfgke 11y ago

> This is all about violating a license/copyright law. If we were talking about a large company using GNU/copyleft code and not sharing their changes back to the community, many people in the community would be demanding the law get involved Companies: not sharing their changes back to the community Publishers: not sharing the papers with everyone willing to do research I see a parallel...

pixelman32 11y ago

Scientific journals don't necessarily fund research, and groups who fund research don't necessarily benefit from proceeds from journal subscriptions. Funding scientific research isn't as simple as, say, funding startups. A vast majority of scientific research, especially basic research, yields no returns on investment. The real issue people have with the way journals work is that they seemingly don't provide a great deal of value. Imagine if GitHub worked like a science journal: You would submit your code to GitHub. They might have someone do a code review or run some tests to assure a baseline level of quality. Then they would lock your repository and charge anyone who wanted to see more than just the readme file $30 - $50. All of the proceeds from that go directly to GitHub. You, the author of the repository, get nothing. A software developer simply would not tolerate this model, but it's the norm in science.

jostmey 11y ago

Having participated in the publishing process, I firmly believe the actions of this girl are justified. When what is legal no longer aligns with what is right, the law must change, or else it becomes a joke.

andrepd 11y ago

>The other issue is that it takes millions of dollars to fund the research for many of these papers. With no incentive to make money on the research, companies will either stop the research, or it will go completely private and there will be no access for anyone. You seem to be basically misunderstanding the whole thing. This isn't about research funding, it's about publisher fees. The issue with the papers is not that they take money to produce and so the researchers then charge money for others to see the results, and that therefore bypassing these fees would deprive the researchers of their hard-earned money they need to keep funding their million dollar research. That is not at all what this is about. The fees being charged are publisher fees, absolutely ridiculous fees for a minimal service that is completely obsolete in the internet age, hampers collaboration and the flow of information, slows down science, prevents underprivileged persons from accessing the research that is in the vast majority of cases publicly funded, and serves only to give money to these publishers, of which absolutely 0% goes to the researchers themselves.

pink_dinner 11y ago
"The fees being charged are publisher fees, absolutely ridiculous fees for a minimal service that is completely obsolete in the internet age, hampers collaboration and the flow of information, slows down science, prevents underprivileged persons from accessing the research that is in the vast majority of cases publicly funded" So we should be able to do whatever we want when we don't agree with a law? this is between publishers and researchers. "and serves only to give money to these publishers, of which absolutely 0% goes to the researchers themselves." This sounds like the 'all music should be shared and free' argument all over again. The last decade of Napster and Torrents have pretty much destroyed any chances of an Indy musician to make a living without the sponsorship of a big corporation. It essentially pushed all of the Indy artists out. They actually had a chance to make a living with music before file sharing became part of our culture (and the belief that bits on a computer should somehow be free since it takes nothing to copy them). The irony is that the exact same thing is happening with job outsourcing and now those same people are clamoring for government intervention. We somehow need to stop the free flow of information when it directly affects your job. I worked in academia in a different life and nearly all research is conducted in some part by private entities pumping money into the University. This won't have the desired effect and will essentially make research even more private. I don't believe the GNU is a truly free license. If I decided to take software, use it in a proprietary app, and then sell it with no source, I would be taken to court (and people here on HN would want me sued out of existence (I've seen it many times already)). Should I have a right to do this? Because this is exactly what is going on here. A copyright license is being broken and you believe it's justified.

SCAQTony 11y ago

The handle "Pink Dinner" was created 15-days ago; about the time Alexandra Elbakyan hit the news hard. If you view the comments posted by this user one might consider them agenda driven toward this sort of topic? ... YMMV

dredmorbius 11y ago
Let's assume good faith. Unless the profile's deleted a bunch of prior pro-Elsevier pieces and filled in a bunch of others, primary evidence doesn't look exceedingly shill-like.