10 ms·

I feel a little tingle of excitement seeing my own papers on Sci-Hub. I mean I get that they're trying to index all publications so it's not a "stamp or approva

by chias 10y ago

I feel a little tingle of excitement seeing my own papers on Sci-Hub. I mean I get that they're trying to index all publications so it's not a "stamp or approval" or anything... but it does mean that people can actually access the knowledge I tried to throw into the world, which was kind of the whole point in doing it. I'd update my academic website to link my papers to their sci-hub URLs if I didn't think I'd catch a world of flak for it.

dougmccune 10y ago
I'm genuinely curious who you think would give you flak. Publishers? Your department faculty? The librarian at your university? Your peers? (reason I'm interested: I'm on the board of Sage and have a board meeting tomorrow where I hope we'll be discussing sci-hub)
- chias 10y ago
  I'm mostly concerned about what my department would do under pressure from publishers and/or the government. Being part of a state university, publicly endorsing illegal actions is unwise on my part. Especially if they undermine the establishment that the school serves.
  - dougmccune 10y ago
    Thanks for the insight. I'm curious to follow it through and try to understand what you think practical repercussions would be. So say you have your CV up online with sci-hub links, and a publisher does somehow complain to the university. Wouldn't the worst that happens be you change it and say sorry? Or do you think there would be more serious consequences? Is being seen as "pro piracy" a black mark that would stay with you somehow?
    - chias 10y ago
      I don't think there would be any real repercussions. But this close to the end, it seems foolish to bet the last six years of my life on a mildly amusing act of civil disobedience. While I have complete faith in my department not being staffed with idiots and zealots, I have no similar faith in our government. Being a state school, that's ultimately who we answer to. The whole Aaron Schwartz debacle evaporated any faith I might have had in our government's ability to deal with this sort of thing like grownups.
- nxzero 10y ago
  SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work. Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?
  - dougmccune 10y ago
    There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad issue. Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture. So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher). The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.
    - nxzero 10y ago
      Understand, thank you for everything you're doing - keep up the good work.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
AndrewOMartin 10y ago
I felt that tingle too! I saw a book I co-edited on SciHub on the same day the publishers sent me a royalty statement reminding me that absolutely zero people want to pay 120GBP to read what I (my co-editors and contributors) put together through a whole lot of unpaid effort.
- robryan 10y ago
  Why wouldn't they price at a rate that would generate some sales? Given that nearly all of the costs associated with the book would have already been paid?
finfet1 10y ago
IEEE and IEEE Explore have been actively going after professors and forcing them to take down links to their own papers. In the past, many professors hosted pdf's on their websites for their papers -- this has only stopped because IEEE has been forcing them off. Just wanted to add this for those who think professors have 'suddenly become stingy' -- no, they aren't - they were forced to.
- therobot24 10y ago
  i haven't heard this, this is interesting any links with more info?
  - finfet1 10y ago
    Academia is probably keeping quiet since most of EE, CS, CE is heavily dependent on IEEE publications for reputation and career advancement and paper-reputation.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      There would be complaints somewhere you can link to. I have a collection of over 15,000 papers. Many I got off of IEEE/ACM. However, many others I got by typing the name into Google and/or CiteSeerx to find same file. I still can usually get any file I think of and many are still on academics sites. Those are high-profile, too. So, where's your evidence that IEEE can or is forcing PDF's off the net?
- JadeNB 10y ago
  Interestingly, it's gone the other way in mathematics. It used to be that lots of journals required authors to sign some sort of statement saying that they wouldn't post PDFs on their web pages. (I remember one professor who had a page essentially saying "Here's the PDFs. Sue me, Elsevier!" Unfortunately, I don't remember who it was) Eventually, I think in response to the massive, overwhelming popularity of the arXiv, which I think most mathematicians would choose over journals if forced to choose, the big publishers decided, slowly, piecemeal, and behind the times as always [0], to go with the times and stop fighting something that was going to happen anyway. [0] With an exception for the AMS, which has always (as long as I have cared, and checked, anyway) had publication policies that are as author- and reader-friendly as one can probably expect in the real world.
hyperion2010 10y ago
These days you can just post the dois and mention scihub somewhere innocuous. The readers will figure it out and I'd love to see the publishers win when there is no direct link to the papers.
omegaham 10y ago
This reminds me of that old Steve Martin movie, The Jerk, where the protagonist finds out that he's in the phone book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aIf1YnbbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aIf1YnbbU
- fosco 10y ago
  Quote" I'm in the phone book! Things are going to start happening for me now!"
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Felt similar seeing my name on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Alex3917 10y ago
> it does mean that people can actually access the knowledge I tried to throw into the world, which was kind of the whole point in doing it. I mean obviously it wasn't the whole point if you didn't publish them freely in the first place.
taneq 10y ago
I know what you mean, it's great to feel like you've contributed to the sum total of humanity's knowledge like that. And now my ego demands that I go check to see whether the one paper I've published is up on there! :D

by chias 10y ago

dougmccune 10y ago

I'm genuinely curious who you think would give you flak. Publishers? Your department faculty? The librarian at your university? Your peers? (reason I'm interested: I'm on the board of Sage and have a board meeting tomorrow where I hope we'll be discussing sci-hub)

chias 10y ago
I'm mostly concerned about what my department would do under pressure from publishers and/or the government. Being part of a state university, publicly endorsing illegal actions is unwise on my part. Especially if they undermine the establishment that the school serves.
- dougmccune 10y ago
  Thanks for the insight. I'm curious to follow it through and try to understand what you think practical repercussions would be. So say you have your CV up online with sci-hub links, and a publisher does somehow complain to the university. Wouldn't the worst that happens be you change it and say sorry? Or do you think there would be more serious consequences? Is being seen as "pro piracy" a black mark that would stay with you somehow?
  - chias 10y ago
    I don't think there would be any real repercussions. But this close to the end, it seems foolish to bet the last six years of my life on a mildly amusing act of civil disobedience. While I have complete faith in my department not being staffed with idiots and zealots, I have no similar faith in our government. Being a state school, that's ultimately who we answer to. The whole Aaron Schwartz debacle evaporated any faith I might have had in our government's ability to deal with this sort of thing like grownups.
nxzero 10y ago
SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work. Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?
- dougmccune 10y ago
  There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad issue. Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture. So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher). The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.
  - nxzero 10y ago
    Understand, thank you for everything you're doing - keep up the good work.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago

AndrewOMartin 10y ago

I felt that tingle too! I saw a book I co-edited on SciHub on the same day the publishers sent me a royalty statement reminding me that absolutely zero people want to pay 120GBP to read what I (my co-editors and contributors) put together through a whole lot of unpaid effort.

robryan 10y ago
Why wouldn't they price at a rate that would generate some sales? Given that nearly all of the costs associated with the book would have already been paid?

finfet1 10y ago

IEEE and IEEE Explore have been actively going after professors and forcing them to take down links to their own papers. In the past, many professors hosted pdf's on their websites for their papers -- this has only stopped because IEEE has been forcing them off. Just wanted to add this for those who think professors have 'suddenly become stingy' -- no, they aren't - they were forced to.

therobot24 10y ago
i haven't heard this, this is interesting any links with more info?
- finfet1 10y ago
  Academia is probably keeping quiet since most of EE, CS, CE is heavily dependent on IEEE publications for reputation and career advancement and paper-reputation.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    There would be complaints somewhere you can link to. I have a collection of over 15,000 papers. Many I got off of IEEE/ACM. However, many others I got by typing the name into Google and/or CiteSeerx to find same file. I still can usually get any file I think of and many are still on academics sites. Those are high-profile, too. So, where's your evidence that IEEE can or is forcing PDF's off the net?
JadeNB 10y ago
Interestingly, it's gone the other way in mathematics. It used to be that lots of journals required authors to sign some sort of statement saying that they wouldn't post PDFs on their web pages. (I remember one professor who had a page essentially saying "Here's the PDFs. Sue me, Elsevier!" Unfortunately, I don't remember who it was) Eventually, I think in response to the massive, overwhelming popularity of the arXiv, which I think most mathematicians would choose over journals if forced to choose, the big publishers decided, slowly, piecemeal, and behind the times as always [0], to go with the times and stop fighting something that was going to happen anyway. [0] With an exception for the AMS, which has always (as long as I have cared, and checked, anyway) had publication policies that are as author- and reader-friendly as one can probably expect in the real world.

hyperion2010 10y ago

These days you can just post the dois and mention scihub somewhere innocuous. The readers will figure it out and I'd love to see the publishers win when there is no direct link to the papers.

omegaham 10y ago

This reminds me of that old Steve Martin movie, The Jerk, where the protagonist finds out that he's in the phone book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aIf1YnbbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aIf1YnbbU

fosco 10y ago
Quote" I'm in the phone book! Things are going to start happening for me now!"
agumonkey 10y ago
Felt similar seeing my name on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Alex3917 10y ago

> it does mean that people can actually access the knowledge I tried to throw into the world, which was kind of the whole point in doing it. I mean obviously it wasn't the whole point if you didn't publish them freely in the first place.

taneq 10y ago

I know what you mean, it's great to feel like you've contributed to the sum total of humanity's knowledge like that. And now my ego demands that I go check to see whether the one paper I've published is up on there! :D