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Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
- Dolores12 11y agoPapers that meant to be free are now pirated. Nice paradigm shift.
- hyperion2010 11y ago> “Graduate students who want to access an article from the Elsevier system should work with their department chair, professor of the class, or their faculty thesis adviser for assistance.” Now THAT is chuckle worthy.
- Jerry2 11y agoImagine wasting some researcher's valuable time on tracking papers for you! The gall of these publishing companies never ceases to amaze.
- chris_wot 11y agoNot very helpful for Wikipedia researchers. Or people who are outside the walled garden of academia!
- kqr 11y agoTo be fair, I haven't set a foot in my university for 3 years (planning to return soon!) but since I still send them the occasional email asking to be registered for a course I'm considered active there and get access to a lot of publications as long as I'm logged in to their systems.
- majewsky 11y agoDo any universities offer something like "passive studentship"? i.e. you pay only a small fraction of the tuition, it does not include any courses, but you may attend the facilities and specifically the library and get access to the university network. If that existed, hobby researchers and the like could get access to all these journals for a probably smaller amount of money.
- avani 11y agoMany universities actually do have a program to give townfolk library cards, including journal access. That said, the best way to get a research paper in CS is to check the author or lab's website and, if it's not there, e-mail the first author directly.
- NoGravitas 11y agoThe state university library here has a [membership program][0] that gives you access to the library and its various subscriptions -- so effectively library donors get access. Individual membership is under $50/year, so it's definitely an affordable option. Not sure if it gives remote access to their network (they used to have a web proxy server for off campus students, don't know if they still do); you may have to go to the library and use the computers there. [0]: http://library.sc.edu/p/Develop/Society/ThomasCooperSociety http://library.sc.edu/p/Develop/Society/ThomasCooperSociety
- hyperion2010 11y agoMy other comment covers this. There is actually an upside to spatio-temporal control, which is that anyone who walks into a university library can access the licensed material for that library. Of course in this day and age such physical restrictions on access seem absurd.
- jbmorgado 11y ago"walled garden of academia" The walled garden of academia is not so fruitful as outsiders are led to think it is. We struggle year after year to pay salaries and still have money to buy the equipment and material we need for the projects, we don't have that much left to spend on buying access articles that we and our peers wrote and that we and our peers reviewed, all for free while some publisher makes millions on it.
- taneq 11y ago> “I’m all for universal access, but not theft!” tweeted Elsevier’s director of universal access, Alicia Wise You want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free. Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given for free. Hmmmm.
- hyperion2010 11y agoI was at a conference with a number representatives from various publishers. During a discussion about access control I was basically told that publishers want to enforce specific spatio-temporal constraints on who can view (as in read with human eyeballs) their content based on whether a library or individual paid for it. They make the other content industries look positively benign.
- userbinator 11y agoThat reminds me of the whole talk around "open standards" that you have to pay for to legally acquire (ANSI, ISO, IEEE, etc.), although in that case the situation is slightly different. Also, the "free software" vs "open source" distinction.
- raverbashing 11y agoOh this is a huge pet peeve of mine, it's unbelievable. Granted, a lot of work goes into these standards, and they don't come out of nowere, still
- chris_wot 11y agoWho pays for the standards committees? I note that the IEEE has a charitable foundation with over $45 million in assets...
- Freak_NL 11y agoYep, this is my bête noire too. It gets even worse. I am working on software that confirms to guidelines set by the Dutch government for handling healthcare data. These Dutch national standards were actually (and justly!) made free instead of available at a fee because they became requirements instead of just guidelines. But these standards are (naturally) based on international standards. This is fine for the RFC's that are freely available, but for the three (!) relevant Dutch standards (NEN 7510, 7512, 7513) you would need access to another forty-ish (!!) ISO standards that may, or may not, be relevant to the section you are dealing with. Of course even a single PDF for these healthcare ISO standards costs up to €100, to be paid in Swiss Francs…
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- davesque 11y agoIt's just so funny how blatantly parasitic some of these publishing companies are.
- tmalsburg2 11y agoLet's not forget that this whole business would not exist if researchers weren't so addicted to the prestige offered by glamorous journals. Most of the people complaining about scientific publishers are actually complicit in their success and dominance.
- chrismonsanto 11y agoThe "prestige," as you call it, is necessary to get a job in academia. Where you publish your research is considered a trustworthy approximation to the quality of your research, and requires a lot less time & expertise to vet.
- sgift 11y agoBasically, the same reason why it's easier to get a job offer if you already have a job at a great company: "Someone vetted him for us, he is probably good" - so much easier for those hiring this way than if they'd actually had to check your previous work.
- gohrt 11y agoBingo. Until a few heroes like [that Fields medalist who works with Tao] stood up and took their prestige elsewhere, nearly all academics were happy to let Elsevier run all the journals and make everyone pay. Field-leading academics and institutional administrators chose to hand over control of researchers' careers to Elsevier.
- abhi3 11y agoWhile pirating music or movies, one may try justify ones actions, but deep down it feels wrong. This doesn't even feel wrong. These parasites had it coming.
- tajen 11y agoIt does feel wrong, but it feels equally wrong that the government orders the police to prevent citizen from copying bytes.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoThe social and cultural value of something is related to the cost of production, not the cost of distribution. The fact that the distribution cost is close to zero is irrelevant. The problem with copyright is that a big proportion of the price charged is basically cartel/gatekeeper protection money, and has no useful relationship to the true social cost/value of creative work.
- gd1 11y agoYou can spin it however you want, but if you are keeping something of worth artificially scarce when it is in fact infinitely abundant, you are deliberately impoverishing the human race. The rules of our economy, supply and demand, break down when supply is infinite... but that is a problem with the economic system that needs to be fixed (perhaps a state funded patronage model?), it's not something that pirates need to feel guilty about. Copyright law reduces the net wealth of the world. It is just plain evil.
- dalke 11y agoCopyright law does not reduce the net wealth of the world. Before I wrote book X, there were no copies of book X in the world. The supply was zero, not infinite. After I wrote book X, the supply was one. Then it grows as people make copies. Copyright law can limit the growth, certainly. (Or enhancement, as the potential profits help promote distribution.) But copyright law is meant to encourage the growth from 0 to 1 by making it possible to make money from the growth from 1 to N, before the lack of copyright protection makes it effectively infinite. It's true that plenty of people will write even without getting paid. It's also true that plenty of people wrote because they will get paid. Heinlein started writing to pay off his mortgage. Copyright law is also the basis for free software. If you take away copyright law, you end up supporting proprietary software distributed only as compiled machine code, not reusable source. This to "impoverishes" the human race.
- jmcgough 11y agoResearchers have been (illegally) helping each other out with paper access for years. I used to hang out in the neuroscience group on livejournal years ago, and about half the posts were people asking "Does anyone have access to Foo et al 2012?" and then having it passed along to them by email.
- eggy 11y agoThey may have started servicing a need in the beginning as simply setting up some servers, and serving as a central repository, which I do not understand why this wasn't just setup by some other part like a university or research foundation for public use, but Elsevier have turned that into holding publicly-funded research hostage. You know when you are debating with somebody, and their logic runs out, they start floundering and emoting? That's what the comments from Elsevier are starting to sound like. I have no problem with them making some money from Ads to help their monthly server hosting and maintenance costs, but they have a weird, self-strangulating business model that is headed nowhere real fast.
- gh02t 11y agoThe major thing publishers facilitated beyond simple distribution was organizing and vetting peer review. I appreciate that they have to make ends meet and that they are contributing something valuable, but it is at a point that the exorbitant price they charge people to read my work makes it basically inaccessible to many people, defeating the point of publishing it in the first place. And lets not even talk about publishers who require exclusive rights, so that technically I can't distribute copies of my own work...
- mirimir 11y agoYes, publishers historically did that. And they printed journals and books, and reprints. But prices were modestly above cost, back in the day. As recently as the 80s. Now, expenses are much lower, and it's all about profiteering.
- chris_wot 11y agoIs there a source for that? I believe you, I'm just interested in the degree!
- mirimir 11y agoI based my comment on memory. As I recall, reprints cost on the order of $0.50 each in the early 80s. Based on http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ that's about $1.20 in present dollars. That's a lot less than $30.
- ericjang 11y agoDoes this suggest that publishing companies like Reed Elsevier plc (RELX group) will eventually be starved of revenue from papers? Or have they figured out an alternative business model to adapt to the changing times?
- isido 11y agoPublishers probably cannot keep up with the current revenue levels, especially since the university library funding is constantly decreasing. And besides Scihub, there are emerging institutional solutions to this problem, like research funders demanding that research paid with public funds must be publicly available, and universities setting up academic repositories where papers published elsewhere are available in open access form.
- Artoemius 11y agoI'm sad Aaron Swartz did not live to see this unfolding. He might have been in prison now, but he would still be a world-class hero.
- nathancahill 11y agoI think about that a lot (have a number of friends publishing papers in academia). Really sad.
- ryanlol 11y ago> He might have been in prison now For hypothetical crimes he could've committed had he lived? Because he certainly wouldn't be in prison for things he actually did.
- philjohn 11y agoHe likely would be in Prison, because he'd be forced to plead out to lesser crimes, or face the prospect of a cripplingly expensive trial with the threat of higher sanctions.
- ryanlol 11y agoNo, that's complete bullshit. Had Aaron pleaded guilty, he'd be out by now as both of the plea agreements he was offered would have meant 6 months or less . And trial? Why would he have gone to trial? There was no question of his guilt.
- jimrandomh 11y agoElsevier believes they have United States law on their side. And they're right; they do have US law on their side. That just doesn't mean much anymore; it's been worn away by decades of conspicuous corruption, and lost most of its respect. In principle, this should be addressed by the US legislature. In practice, academia has effectively voted no-confidence and bypassed the legal system entirely.
- studentrob 11y ago> In practice, academia has effectively voted no-confidence and bypassed the legal system entirely. Yup. Seems like civil disobedience from the research community. Pretty interesting to see a civil rights movement happening online. Who says you can't sit at home and be an activist? ;-)
- bloaf 11y agoI've had a feeling, recently, that there should be some maxim that goes something like: Don't put yourself in a position where the lawyers are the only ones on your side.
- bendykstra 11y agoI recently wanted to read a five page paper on graph theory from 1977. The company entrusted with it 40 years ago is charging $38 for it. It is just absurd. I can't imagine that the author, now long dead, would have wanted his work to be so difficult to read.
- sigjuice 11y agoJust out of curiosity, what paper is this?
- jonathankoren 11y agoAll of them.
- drewm1980 11y ago70's graph theory papers FTW! I bet if you actually pay that $40, the pdf you get will still be typeset with a typewriter.
- leot 11y agoElsevier and others can go something themselves. Their behavior over the last two decades has been little more than reprehensible rent-seeking. Whatever goodwill they had disappeared as they sapped with increasing ruthlessness the dollars of students and non-profits. See, e.g., one of many such figures: http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_graph.png http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_grap... It is absurd and dishonest to call Sci-Hub "piracy", given that all of its contents were originally created and given away with the express goal of wide dissemination.
- finfet1 11y agoTotally agree. I have gone through academia and am now in industry; the other day I wanted to read and browse basic papers in IEEE Explore for basic knowledge on new topics. Since I am no longer a student, I am willing to pay money - as much as hundreds to get unlimited access. Instead, for hundreds, IEEE explore offers a measly ("generous") 25 downloads a month or some such non-sense It just seemed so miserly of them. We researchers had formerly given them pretty much free research to publish, and they turn their back on even legitimate paid avenues for us to get the papers. We are willing to pay; but where is the option? Anyone that has gone through research and academia knows that you often need to browse many papers to even find the ones worth reading. 25 paper cap includes browsing PDFs; you will easily hit that cap in a single day simply through browsing. IEEE and IEEE Explore can go something themselves. This is coming from a published IEEE author and academic researcher.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- donlzx 11y agoAfter the IEEE $25 monthly service came out, I subscribed for three years until finally canceled it. Honestly most of the papers I downloaded were junks, the only reason I download them was to verify the available references. The paper quality declination plus publication quantity inflation are the main reasons in this "Sci-Hub" crisis.
- kcole16 11y agoWhat exactly is the benefit of Elsevier for researchers? Is there no free way to publish papers?
- hyperbovine 11y agoElsevier own some really high profile journals, including The Lancet and Cell. Refusing to publish in these journals, or similar ones in terms of impact factor, is simply not an option for junior faculty in most departments. I have friends for whom "publishing in Nature, Science and/or Cell" is literally a precondition for getting tenure.
- Chinjut 11y agoWhy does academia put up with this stupid system? Academics are already the ones doing all the peer review on their own, free of payment, right? So why not say "Hey, we'll set up our own servers, host papers free for all to access, and then note which ones pass the same levels of scrutiny we'd apply as reviewers were we reviewing them for Nature, Science, Cell, The Lancet, whatever"? Doesn't seem like the journals actually provide much beyond asking professors to do stuff for free, both in terms of writing papers and reviewing them. Is inertia really worth letting them leech so much money and lock down access (antithetical to the whole idea of public-ation...) while they're at it?
- gohrt 11y agoBecause most of leading academics were happy with the system and don't care about open access. This is slowly changing as the Internet generation takes over.
- chris_wot 11y agoIs tenure still as widely available as it once was? But yes, entrenched interests hold everyone back eventually. They are currently being disrupted, and this time they lost the battle completely - there is not a single thing they can do to effectively keep their entrenched interests from crumbling.
- daveguy 11y agoIf anyone is having trouble accessing https://scihub.io https://scihub.io (the site providing the papers) you can find the site directly at the ip address: https://31.184.194.81/ https://31.184.194.81/ ... Apparently the domain name was seized. The certificate is for sci-hub.io (safe to accept). Or you can just connect to http://31.184.194.81/ http://31.184.194.81/ if you don't want to bother with the warnings (and are ok with DOIs and papers being transmitted without encryption). EDIT: Their other domains: https://sci-hub.cc https://sci-hub.cc (uses sci-hub.io certificate) https://sci-hub.bz https://sci-hub.bz (uses a separate certificate and ip address -- 104.28.20.155) And a tor site: scihub22266oqcxt.onion
- s4chin 11y agoOr even http://sci-hub.bz/ http://sci-hub.bz/ and http://sci-hub.cc/ http://sci-hub.cc/
- chris_wot 11y agoEventually they'll just setup their own DNS system, or replace it with something else entirely. something like a BitTorrent for nameservers.
- sashazykov 11y agohttps://bit.namecoin.info/ https://bit.namecoin.info/
- jcoffland 11y agoNameCoin is a failure. There are two problems. 1. no one uses it. 2. cybersquatters.
- canndrew2016 11y agohttps://gnunet.org/gns https://gnunet.org/gns
- majewsky 11y ago
- guelo 11y agoAs in so many other endeavors the law works to protect the true criminals against humanity.
- thirdsun 11y agoI don't get it - some commenters are suggesting that the authors of those papers aren't paid, but the publisher is. Why would the author want to limit the spread and accessibility of his work in such a way? As an outsider who doesn't have any experience with scientific papers and how to get them, it seems very obvious to me that there should be a huge demand for an open platform to publish and read those papers - from authors and readers alike. Why does this role need to be filled by an at best semi-legal party like SciHub? The fact that users with legitimate access to those papers actually opt for SciHub to get them confirms that the current solutions just aren't working for their users. So why would authors rely on them?
- Derbasti 11y agoBecause many important old-timers still read journals back-to-back. This is how they stay up-to-date, and how they find citations. If you are not in a journal, they won't cite you.
- pedrosorio 11y agoWhere a scientist publishes papers can make or break their career. Historically for area A, journals B, C, D have the highest impact. If you want your work to be recognized as high quality you will publish in those journals and whether they are "open" or "controlled by a publisher" is irrelevant. It just so happens that for most scientific areas, the high impact journals are all owned by publishers.
- thirdsun 11y agoThanks, got it - so it's the equivalent of signing to a major label instead of releasing your album on Bandcamp. However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?
- barkbro 11y agoImagine yourself as an employer who has to go through a large amount of applications. You can either read all their publications (if you even understand them) and try to get some idea of their academic performance, or just trust that the more prestigious journals require the publications to be of importance and quality.
- gregw134 11y agoHave any of the mirror sites uploaded all 50M papers as a torrent yet? They really should...
- polarix 11y agoYeah, I guess we're at the point where 50tb arrays are not infeasible. Not sure where I'd get 50tb of bandwidth though without someone gnawing off my left foot.
- omgtehlion 11y ago50tb is like 1/10th of a backblaze pod. And 50tb of bandwidth is not really that much (last month I spent 1.2TB of bandwidth on a consumer grade connection, so like 50 users can pull this off in a month)
- goodplay 11y agoThey should categorize papers into specific fields (and sub-fields). Each party would torrent what interests them. Also, this might make a great use case for IPFS as apposed to torrents. Torrents are not designed to be mutable.
- kanzure 11y ago> any of the mirror sites uploaded all 50M papers as a torrent yes... but their bandwidth (seeding) is atrocious. Send help.
- gregw134 11y agoWhere can I find the torrent?
- rdl 11y agoJournals becoming free would probably vastly more to the economy than the rents extracted by the journal publishing industry. Sci-Hub is one way, but perhaps another way would be either a philanthropist or government buying the companies out, or applying eminent domain to the research.
- kriro 11y agoI'm ideologically primed to favor free access to information (especially if any tax money was involved which is true for pretty much all research) but I think a middle ground of moving scientific publishing to a nextflix/itunes/kindle model would solve a lot of issues. Access a paper -> (micro) payment to the journal (who could in return set up another (micro) payment to the actual author). The biggest issue is the pricing model (35$/paper when a researcher typically needs to read 100+ papers per papers he/she writes) and the lack of a single point of access. Like iTunes for science. Go do it someone. I won't envy you, I'll expect you to fail but if you pull it off I'll be forever grateful.
- digler999 11y ago> would solve a lot of issues like making sure the 1% get their rent-seeking royalties. The cost of distributing information is 0. Whatever negligible cost to keep the servers running can come from the "technology fees" universities charge their students.
- Jonathanks 11y agoI read "Internet Book Piracy" recently about this issue and the author, Gini Graham, has valid points and suggestions for reducing piracy; this was one of her suggestions. I have no problem with Elsevier crying wolf when there's none. They had it coming. I'm concerned about the actual cost to authors. We need a new model that puts the authors and their readers as first priorities and facilitates the movement of information, not hoarding it. Publishing companies did that for a while, then they declared themselves custodians of our common knowledge and hoarded it from us. I'm thinking of ways publishing can be made what it should be. Gini Graham has good suggestions that I'd like to see tried out.
- sachkris 11y agoThe first three paragraphs of the article clearly tells what is wrong with the system - "Publishers are overcharging for content". Basically, they just continued their business model from the printed-book era to the e-book era without much change. The publishers should think of allowing individuals to subscribe to the content and charge them (nominally) for what they use, rather than putting the load on the Universities and making them subscribe the entire spectrum of journals. The Pay-per-view model of Elsevier currently charges an individual researcher (a staggering) "$31.50 per article or chapter for most Elsevier content. Select titles are priced between $19.95 and $41.95 (subject to change)." [0] [0] -https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay-per-view https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay...
- chris_wot 11y agoThe median wage in Afghanistan is 50,000 AHD per year. Currently the exchange rate for USD to AHD is about 68.3 AHD to 1 USD. So basically, for one article it is about 2,150 AHD, or half the monthly wage of someone with s median income. That's for one midrange article.
- dewiz 11y agoIs sci hub dead then? DNS doesn't resolve the host anymore
- youngbullind 11y agoSee the other post in this thread with other URLs and the IP address.
- throwaway3523 11y agoJust as a note about who gets denied access.... I work in a US research lab but my department got spun off into a company. With the loss of my university credentials came my loss of library access.... I still need to read papers in random journals to do my job though. EDIT: A cash poor company.
- kken 11y agoIt looks like this is EXACTLY what is needed to distrupt this abusive industry. There have been numerous attempts of enforcing a change in positive ways - open access journals, campaigns by researchers and so on. But none of these had any effect. Let Elsevier go down in flames. I have published more than 50 academic papers and have actively avoided Elsevier. To be honest, this was not too difficult, as they have a lot of journals addressing specialized subtopics that rather seem to appeal to manuscripts that were rejected in first tier journals.
- fferen 11y agoAs a grad student at a university with ample access to journals, I still use sci-hub occasionally, as many journal sites are surprisingly unreliable (cough IEEE, cough Nature).
- sumanthvepa 11y agoI may be naive here, but why not search and download the article's preprint from arXiv? Would it be that much different from the final paper? Why would you need to pirate at all?
- jboynyc 11y agoNot all disciplines use arXiv -- far from it. Especially in the humanities and social sciences, there isn't really anything comparable to arXiv. But you are right, preprints are not all that different from published papers, as this recent analysis confirmed: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363 http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363 [edited to add:] I suppose you could look at the data (https://blog.datadryad.org/2016/04/28/sci-hub-stories/ https://blog.datadryad.org/2016/04/28/sci-hub-stories/) and see what proportion of requested DOIs have a preprint version in the arXiv. I suspect it's rather small.
- _Wintermute 11y agoBecause most papers are not on arXiv.
- dredmorbius 11y agoI was interviewed for this article though not mentioned in it. My use case isn't mentioned: unaffiliated researchers with limited access to journals doing our own exploration of areas. I've compiled a library of several thousand articles (and via other sources, books) which for both access and portability I prefer electronic versions. My 10" tablet is almost perfect for reading printed material, and functions as a small research library on its own. (Organising this content is another headache -- Android and apps are sadly lacking in this area, one of the few options being Mendalay, owned by, you guessed it, Elsevier. Burn it with fire.) While I can and do access materials from libraries, including online access, Sci-Hub is both more complete and far more reliable and convenient. Find a resource, plug in the URL or DOI, and I've got it. Versus locating the same reference independently through one of several distinct libraries, each with their own multiple subsystems, authenticating, and sometimes, sometimes not, securing the material. Another point Bohannon failed to address, which is covered in the discussion here, is the role of journal publishers as gatekeepers not only to content but to careers. Academics, increasingly squeezed by budget retrenchments and awful working conditions[1], must publish through prestige journals in order to establish and advance their careers. Journal publishers are rent-seeking at both ends of this channel. Sci-Hub, or as I like to call it, the Library of Alexandra, hs a tour de force demonstration that information is a public good, and that information access wants, and needs to be free. Sci-Hub isn't a complete answer to the problems of current academic publishing (again: publish or perish), but it's a relief valve for many, and an absolute and irrefutable proof of the pressing demands for access. ________________________________ Notes: 1. See the amazingly awful story of a young newlywed biology postdoc who lost her arm in a lab explosion involving an improperly instrumented gas cylinder in which oxygen and hydrogen were being mixed under pressure. This after repeatedly reporting short circuits and electric shocks from the equipment. http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2016/03/postdoc-loses-arm-in-lab-explosion-in.html http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2016/03/postdoc-loses-arm-in-...
- dzdt 11y agoI was disappointed the article didn't mention individuals unaffiliated with institutions. What fraction of PhD's have a university job? 20%? These are people who devoted years of their life to reading others' research and doing their own. But if you aren't any more at a university you don't count.
- santialbo 11y agoBefore sci-hub, whenever I needed a paper I would email the author kindly asking for a copy. Almost everytime I would have the PDF by the end of the day. Researchers are happy to share their knowledge.
- musha68k 11y agoWow <3 Alexandra Elbakyan is my new favorite super hero: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/alexandra-elbakyan-founded-sci-hub-thwart-journal-paywalls http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/alexandra-elbakyan-fo...
- SXX 11y agoThis doesn't really affect the project, but keep in mind she is very controversion person. For instance she support government censorship of political opposition and generally don't support freedom of speech. And likely half of people commented there would be banned on any sci-hub related resource since she usually ban anyone who don't fully agree with what project doing.
- pencilcode 11y agoShe's the one who's putting herself at risk. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. And every time you slander someone you really should link to independent sources so others can at least verify and judge for themselves.
- SXX 11y agoI'm not telling you that you shouldn't like the project, but likely you don't want to have "heroes" like that. At least comparing her to Aaron Swartz is really bad idea in my opinion. If you want source there is her comments on Russian website: https://geektimes.ru/users/sci-hub/comments/ https://geektimes.ru/users/sci-hub/comments/ (most importantly latest one) She's heavily downvoted there since most of IT-related audience in Russsia don't support autocratic regimes. She call that community downvoted her is "fifth column" (which in CIS is term for political opposition used by dictators fans) and censorship of internet resources that support political opposition is good thing. There was other case when sci-hub community made some poll on their social network page about supporing what they doing and then banned everyone who voted against. Sadly it's harder to find source on this one since everything related to incedent is deleted and everyone posted about that is removed from their group.
- erwinbierens 11y agohttp://sci-hub.bz/ http://sci-hub.bz/ and http://sci-hub.cc/ http://sci-hub.cc/
- Zelmor 11y agoIt is in the interest of the general public to mirror these services as many time as we should. Paywalls for scientific articles are holding back the whole species. Fusion reactor when? Maybe when the patents for technological advance will not be held by oil companies around the world, whose short term interests cap the our technological progress to make the world a more livable place. I have a couple PhD student friends, who give me first hand account of biology articles being inaccessible in 2nd world countries due to paywalls and financial limitations of research facilities. It is holding back research in just about every field, I suppose.
- return0 11y agoPrimarily in life sciences. In other disciplines, you have arxiv, or simply publishing in commercial journals doesnt matter that much.
- Fiahil 11y agoOne of the many problems we have as humans and citizens of the world, is our dependence on US laws. It's not like it's cataclysmic-bad but there are some issues that would greatly benefit, to the rest of the world, from a little push by US citizens on US law makers (It's not like we can do something about it, we're not invited to the conversation). This is one of them.
- blaze33 11y agoSo one commenter said that "Journals are used as a proxy for quality", another that they loose so much time browsing through low-quality papers. Isn't the root issue that we need an open and standard way to review, sort and rate all those academics papers ? Developing voting, flagging, moderating mechanisms, that's what many developers have done for years now on the web. Obviously you wouldn't rate papers like reddit comments but plug arxiv/sci-hub to a system allowing researchers to say what papers they reviewed, what their degree of approval is, eventually where it's been published, who references this paper etc. Seems like Arxiv has an endorsement system but as they say "The endorsement process is not peer review", just a way to reduce spam. Isn't there anything done on this subject ?
- bryanrasmussen 11y agowell there is one way to rate academic papers that has proven pretty successful, and that is citing the paper in other papers - however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality.
- fsloth 11y ago"however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality." As a non-academic but with some insight there - this matches with most research, I think. Upvoting at a heat of the moment is kinda worthless as it comes to rating academic output. You need quite a lot of time to draw valid conclusions about a paper. If everyone voted for every paper this would mean that a huge chunk of the competent population would spend an inordinate amount of time on a single paper. That's why it's far more efficient that only a few people of more-or-less guaranteed competence spend considerable effort in reviewing results. One high-quality vote is much better than thousand low-quality ones. This efficiency mechanism and validating the qualifications of the reviewers is the only added-value the established publication systems brings in to the table as discoverability has become cheap commodity.
- blaze33 11y agoI'm not advocating for anonymous instant votes like we can do it here. Researcher already do peer-review for free, allow them to do it on an open platform with free publication afterwards, I don't see why it couldn't work.
- gambiting 11y agoI guess that soon governments will start forcing ISPs to ban access to Sci-Hub, just like they did with Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents. It's still trivial to type into google "pirate bay proxy" and access it quickly, but I can see some legislation happening against it soon.
- pahool 11y agoIt's fully mirrored and available on a .onion site accessible through tor: scihub22266oqcxt.onion
- cant_kant 11y agoIf the paper is retracted, do the publishers give a refund ? See http://retractionwatch.com/ http://retractionwatch.com/ to see the massive number of retractions that happen.
- nxzero 11y agoAccess to pubs is just a symptom of a huge issue, calling science science; science as it is at best a "soft" science and at worst, in many cases, whack quackery that preys on the weak. As an example of what I mean, as of 2010, 91% of published pubs for the field of psychology supported their original hypothesis; if this isn't an obvious red flag, not sure what would be. Intellectual fraud needs to be criminalized and claims based on science must require not only reproducibility, but solid means of denying the authors of any form of plausible deniability from escaping responsibility for what in many cases is fraud, or worse, blindly seeding their own bias as reality. _______ [1] Quackery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery [2] Positive Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010068 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [3] Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
- cameldrv 11y agoOne of the reasons the deep learning field is moving so fast is that everything is open access. Generally, it's considered prestigious to present at a conference, and not much gets published in journals. The major conferences have been adopting a model of posting first on arxiv and then submitting to the conference, so the reviewers see the paper at the same time as the general public. The amazing thing is that weeks after the paper hits arxiv, new papers are coming out, improving on the previous one. By the time the paper is accepted and the conference rolls around, it's actually almost old-hat.
- woodson 11y agoThe quality of reviews of conference papers is mostly terrible, though. I've been on both sides of it, here are some major complaints: * There is only one round of reviews, with a binary accept/reject outcome. In case of rejection, feedback cannot be incorporated. In case of acceptance, there is basically no incentive for incorporating feedback, as the paper is already "through" and putting in any more time is considered a waste. * Assigning papers to reviewers is very arbitrary and often the reviewers are not at all familiar with the field. Getting a paper reassigned to another reviewer is often so complicated and time-consuming that reviewers just do the bare minimum (if asked to rate novelty/originality etc., on a scale 1-5 they give it a "3", which given the usual acceptance rate of <50% means the paper will get rejected). * Reviewers usually get a lot of papers to review. They don't have time (who does?) but have to finish by a two-week deadline. If one of the papers is relevant to the research of the reviewer or has been written by colleagues they know (double-blind does not help, you recognize who wrote it..), that paper will receive attention; the other papers are seen as distraction and are dealt with as outlined above. Peer-review is important, though. Some fields of research, particularly those where a lot of research is done by actual practitioners and not just pure research scientists, are mostly driven by conferences with short (one page or less) abstracts without full papers. There are often very few citeable sources that have been peer reviewed; conference websites and abstract books vanish over the years. An arxiv-like repository can help with that, but it does not solve the problem of peer review. Community-run open-access journals seem to provide a solution, but rarely take off.
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- dschiptsov 11y agoKnowledge shall be free and unbiased by authority. Free access for everyone to knowledge and healthy scepticism produces miracles. In India, for example, lack of restrictions and tolerance to every opinion produced, besides thousands of sects and cults, the best philosophy this world have seen so far. The site, it seems, is a part of natural social movement, similar to FOSS, rather than paid content piracy. It is against restrictions. When some parasites are trying to construct a paywall then society sooner or later would find the way around it, be it knowledge or any other form of digital content - selling an output of the sendfile syscall by those who haven't produced anything would never been tolerated, it violates the hardwired notion of fairness. Especially when one assumes that these papers has been written to spread knowledge and contribute to scientific community (a-la contrubution to open source), not to make money by selling copies - it isn't a paperback.
- vbezhenar 11y agoThere's an easy way for Elsevier to find compromised accounts used to download articles. I wonder if they will pursue account owners some day.
- lottin 11y agoThis isn't just about the academia. As soon as you want to write about any technical subject, even if it's only for your own personal use, you need to study the relevant literature. Often this means reading dozens of papers. There's no way a normal person who isn't working at a university or research institution can afford that.
- EvgeniyZh 11y agoThe system is broken. Rich universities are ready to pay money, so publishers can raise price, basically making papers unavailable for poor universities who can't handle subscriptions or individuals. At the same time publishers hardly spend any money - most of people access publications online, not printed, and tons of journals don't have minimal review. So publisher does nothing and wants much money for that. Scientist at the same time are stuck - if you want people to read your paper, you need good journal or conference, else you might be not heard. Leave alone prestige and fame. So, something has to be done. Maybe Sci-Hub is that something.
- Hondor 11y agoIf the business model of Elsevier/etc somehow collapses, I wonder how universities will make hiring decisions? They high fees of their journals are effectively a recruitment or candidate selection service paid by university libraries and serving departments when they hire faculty. Perhaps they'll have to revert to assessing applicants on their merits instead of such arbitrary metrics as the impact factor of a journal that they published their work in.
- return0 11y agoHow do they do it in CS? People there communicate with arxiv links, not dois.
- richard_mcp 11y agoThey still publish in conferences. A lot just happen to put their stuff on arxiv first
- ufo 11y agoOne thing that helps a lot in CS is that most authors upload their papers to their personal websites.
- wutf 11y agoTorrent the papers. Why hasn't this been done?
- mrkgnao 11y agoCan someone explain the regular (weekly?) dips in the graph of Sci-Hub usage? Is it people not working on Sundays?
- yagyu 11y agoWhat can you do as a researcher without violating your contract? I decided to not referee papers to be paywalled. You can, too! http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-review.html http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-revi...
- chris_wot 11y agoThey compare SciHub to Napster. I have news for U.S. Corporate giants - this is no Napster. For one, this isn't downloading what is essentially entertainment. This is downloading serious content without which researchers and students couldn't help the world progress in positive and vital ways. Secondly, a lot of this content wasn't funded by the ones publishing it, and it shows in the comments every time this gets broached because almost every writer whose work is published tells the same story - they didn't get paid by the publisher and all they are doing is preventing their work from being distributed to the widest audience possible. Thirdly, this time the bullies can't touch those who are distributing the work. One of the consequences of the pervasive reach of the Internet is that if pirated material falls outside of the jurisdiction of a nation that strictly endorses its copyright law then there is virtually nothing that nation can do about it. When Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann prosecuted Aaron Swartz they thought they had struck a blow for copyright holders everywhere. And they did for a few years. Under three years later, however, the rules of the game changed and this time there is no one they could easily prosecute, because they are outside of their grasp and there is no way to persecute them, or make an example of them. The established order has changed. Those who should have known better, who should have put conditions on publicly financed research to be open to all instead allowed greedy and amoral companies like Elsevier to take the hard work of others and sell it for a profit, giving almost nothing back to the system they are pillaging. Too late they choose to open the door slightly ajar to make those on the outside think they will be granted access, only to slam that door shut before they can get inside. Too late do they realise that a gentleman thief has broken in and distributed their ill-gotten gains to the ones they stole from. Those who ruthlessly pursued the Aaron Swartz's of the world have finally been undone. Their arrogance and rapacity blinded them to the reality that they cannot deny information to the world. They did not heed the words of those who enabled the digital revolution. This struggle was predicted by Stewart Brand in 1984, who said to Steve Wozniak at the first Hackers Conference in Marin County, San Francisco: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is lower and lower all the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other." [1] That tension continues, but the old guard is now fighting a rear guard action. They will fight back, but they will remain in retreat until one day they give up, or are forced to and information becomes free. On that day be thankful, because the bindings of the ones who wish to shackle your mind and creativity will have lost the power to do so, to the incalculable good of humanity. 1. https://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge338.html https://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge338.html
- jnsaff2 11y ago"The numbers for Ashburn, Virginia, the top U.S. city with nearly 100,000 Sci-Hub requests, are harder to interpret." Am I the only one who thinks this is just the location of AWS us-east-1? People might be using proxies located there or have bulk download jobs.
- TheCoelacanth 11y agoUndoubtedly. Ashburn has a population of less than 50,000 people. There's no way it could have almost 50% more use than New York City with millions of people.
- amelius 11y agoSci-hub is nice, but it would be nicer if these papers were available in torrent form, so we wouldn't have to depend on a single source (which can fail at some point).
- KKKKkkkk1 11y agoThis discussion thread feels like a deja vu from the Napster and Kazaa days. The wheels of the US legal system have been set in motion, and even if we think that information wants to be free, the days of sci-hub are numbered.
- wsfull 11y agoIf the cost to students attending universities that have adequate subscriptions is small -- previously, commenters suggested this portion of their tuition amounted to only a small annual fee -- then what would be the reasons the publishers would not offer individual subscriptions at similar cost to the public? As any serious student knows, the "a la carte" prices are absurd -- how successful have they been with this idea? One silly idea deserves another: Generally, journals manage their subscriptions through filtering on IP address ranges. Imagine a customer-ISP agreement that had an option whereby a subscriber could "opt in" to academic journals for a few extra dollars per month. These subscribers might then be assigned addresses in certain designated ranges by their ISP.
- topstriker515 11y agoI'm not familiar with the procedure of publishing a paper, so please excuse my ignorance. What's preventing someone from submitting their work to publishers AND uploading it to an open access platform? They can rely on the journal for quality-review/validation/etc. while still allowing for wide dissemination.
- alceufc 11y agoMost journals require that the authors sign an agreement in which the publisher retains the copyright of the paper (e.g. [1]). Although a few publishers allow the authors to provide a pdf of the paper in their personal home-page, they do allow it to be uploaded to an open access platform. [1] https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/copyright https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/...
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- jbmorgado 11y agoIt baffles me how a publisher that doesn't create the content neither pays for it, was deemed by the law as the copyright holder of the works they didn't create neither did they pay for.
- jerryhuang100 11y agosome papers on that top 10 list are even free on the original publisher sites or ncbi (eg. nejm). so why getting them on sci-hub rather than from the original? ppl don't read supplements any more?
- jcoffland 11y agoI find a login at my alma matter and an HTTP proxy over SSH quite useful for accessing research papers.
- tater_sent_me 11y agoI've published several dozen papers through these academic publishers. I get no royalties. I have no problem with people pirating them, and I have no qualms about pirating other people's papers.
- foobarbecue 11y agoThe author refers to Napster as a "pirate site." I stopped reading at that point because I realized the technical info in the document is likely to be incorrect.
- KMag 11y agoNapster was famously run by a group that would board container ships full of music CDs as they rounded the Horn of Africa, kill the crews, rip the CDs to MP3, the burn and sink the ships. At least that's my impression from reading press releases at the time.
- tibbon 11y ago20 years ago, most people assumed that MP3 file sharing would never take us to a place where you can pay a company $9.99/month for unlimited streaming of a huge portion of published music. Surely, the Industry would never allow that to happen! Yet, it did. I'm told that the journals will never allow themselves to become antiquated and that they play a vital role in the review process. I'm seeing this being chipped away at slowly, and have to wonder if soon that small movement will accelerate greatly.
- Hondor 11y agoYou could say it also took us to a place where there are no more Elvis's, Michael Jacksons, Beatles or Queens. This might just be my perspective failure due to growing old but maybe the quality of music has degenerated into singers shouting insults at each other for the past 10 years? Academia is already plagued with too much research. Useless methodologically faulty research because every man and his dog wants to publish sometime, anything.
- biehl 11y agoNice comment here https://storify.com/KyleSiler/dupuis-on-sciencemagazine-sci-hub-artcle https://storify.com/KyleSiler/dupuis-on-sciencemagazine-sci-...
- ylem 11y agoJust curious--where does ResearchGate fit into all of this? I see constant requests where people ask for papers, but is it actually legal to give them out? There is an interesting discussion here: https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_is_ResearchGate_dealing_with_copyright_issues_when_posting_our_papers https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_is_ResearchGate_dealin...
- ujjwalg 11y agoI wrote about horrors of scientific publishing not just from the viewership side, but also from publishing side a few years ago. tl;dr - Publishers have just too much control on publishing process and distribution process when they bring almost nothing to the table in the digital world we are living today. The very fact that as a scientist you can only submit a paper to one journal at a time and wait for months and sometimes a year to get a response is insane and completely unacceptable. Imagine if you have to do it when you are applying for a job. If someone wants to read it, here is a link: http://ujjwalg.com/blog/2013/5/3/the-problem-with-the-scientific-publishing-process http://ujjwalg.com/blog/2013/5/3/the-problem-with-the-scient...
- tacos 11y agoThe least secure format on the web (PDF) + sketchy (ex-)Soviet servers + high-end researchers in aerospace and materials science. What could possibly go wrong?
- darawk 11y agoThese journals contribute precisely nothing to the world. They don't pay the authors, and they pay the reviewers a trivial amount (if at all). They provide exactly nothing, and they extract tremendous amounts of capital from what would have been some of its most productive uses. There are only a few things that I can truly say I will watch wither and die with unconditional, unreserved glee, and the academic publishing industry is one of them.
- onetimePete 11y agoThe economy of disrupting ruptured by it shear forces - aka by itself? AIs crawling over the knowledge base? Good thing they cant publish papers with meaningful recombined results yet. Or can they. The irony is that the church of singularity is not relevant to the process - its like declaring evolution some godlike principle or cataclysmic event- while it just is a glider gun going forth, not knowing, not wanting to know. Still interesting times. I guess in the end, the science journals just where roadblocks in Alphabets way. So they have to go- so they will die, the usual way- with there resource supply systems stripped from them by a not "attackable" third party, condemned by those who benefit, as a barbaric, lawless act. If they would have foresight, they would release all the papers they have into the public domain, and have there true opponents wrestle with the GPL and thus the allmende that produced the wealth. Instead they are having a nap at the ste ering wheel moment. In the end it will help mankind. So can we drop the charade and get on with it?
- tmptmp 11y agoFrom the article: >>Among the few things she would not disclose is her current location, because she is at risk of financial ruin, extradition, and imprisonment because of a lawsuit launched by Elsevier last year. Elsevier should be condemned for its greedy acts. People should send them letters of condemnation for their greedy acts, including for this lawsuit. We can send them e-mails and therein can state, something on the following lines: >>> Publisher, I, a member of academia, am concerned about the hurdles you have put in the path of the progress of science and education. I condemn your behavior and also condemn your decision to file a lawsuit against a person named "Alexandra Elbakyan" to throttle her efforts to spread the publicly funded research knowledge to the public without any "middlemen" like you. I applaud her efforts behind the sci-hub project that was far long due. You might have forgotten by now, but due to, and/or by, the middlemen like you, a noble person named Aaron Swartz was harassed to no end and it must be due to the pain and stress inflicted in that harassment he committed suicide. Please wake up and get rid of your mean tactics and save whatever little goodwill you might have managed to retain. No thanks, as I cannot thank you. <<< Personally I have sent them a mail to this effect. Haven't got any response, it seems obvious. Are there any legal repercussions that these mean, greedy publishers can pursue to harass the email senders, especially in USA? I am not from USA. Legal experts there can advise. No need to mention, I am a huge fan of Alexandra Elbakyan and Aaron Swartz. They are great heroes of modern times. The thoughts of Aaron bring tears to my eyes. They are legendary and remind me of (may be fictional) Robin Hood [1]. I also thank all the academics who are actively helping the sci-hub project and all the people who are helping in their own capacity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood edit: added thanks to all academics and people.