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In rich and poor countries, researchers turn to Sci-Hub
- S_Daedalus 10y agoHopefully there's a better outcome than just lowering prices per unit though.
- bitJericho 10y agoLowering prices? Did music prices actually get lower? I recall always being able to buy a cd for 10-20 bucks. Prices are only marginally cheaper and only for digital.
- S_Daedalus 10y agoYou're right, but now you don't have to buy any more than a buck's worth of it if you don't feel like it, which is an improvement. Still, a dubious one I think. In any case, scientific writing needs to be out in the open for everyone, including those with a buck to spare, to have access to. Never mind all of the other ridiculous aspects of a publisher making mint on this.
- Retric 10y agoInflation adjusted music has gotten significantly cheaper. ~17$ in 1990 ~32$ in 2016. Wage stagnation has kind of muddled the issue somewhat though.
- b0p1x 10y agoTook me awhile to understand what you mean. I calculated inflation in Canada to be $27 today from $17 in 1990 (which was about what I paid then). Of course I pay $10-13 per album now.
- fwn 10y agoWith Spotify et al., prices for access to music settled on a low monthly rate. You get all the music for the price of half a CD a month.
- viraptor 10y agoMost music. There are still record companies which think the exclusive deals are something good.
- bitJericho 10y agoI'm finding I could have bought 90 percent of the music I've listened to on Spotify 3x over had I just bought the CDs and not used spotify. (not giving up spotify, it's just too nice for finding good music)
- bdcravens 10y agoBuying a song for $0.99-$1.49 is definitely cheaper, as I'd often buy a CD for $15 to get 3 songs I wanted. There were occasions with some hidden gems, but 95%+ of all my album purchases are categorized as $3-7 dollars per song I wanted. (even when singles were still a thing)
- agumonkey 10y agoNo proof physical music prices went up ? shrinking market => less economy of scale => higher price (my eco-noob POV)
- agumonkey 10y agoMany researchers explained how significant was sci hub in their work. Pretty sure it avoided wasting brain time already. Spending money on better areas too.
- S_Daedalus 10y agoI'm thinking more of long-term effects on science publishing, that survive after Sci-Hub is potentially taken apart or subverted as Napster was. Napster wasn't that great, but it taught a lot of people directly, just how much better they could be doing in terms of digital distribution. Hopefully sci-hub will have a similar lasting impact, as a result of the reduction in waste you're talking about. Even if it dies, people won't accept it; that's what I hope.
- tgokh 10y agoWhile it may be far from ideal, I know a lot of academics who would be willing to pay a dollar for access to an article their library doesn't have access to instead of going to Sci-Hub, but when the only option now is to pay $40 per article or obtain it through more questionable means (whether through SciHub or Reddit/Twitter or friends at another university), people don't really have a choice.
- a3_nm 10y agoThe comparison with Napster is troubling, because it gives the impression that the balance of right and wrong is the same for science and for music. The main difference with Napster is that, in the case of music, there was some argument to be made that piracy was harmful to music, because some (tiny) part of music sales benefited the artists (and, as we all know, every pirate download was a lost sale...). In the case of science publishers, the money simply never goes from publishers to researchers. Scientists are paid by entirely different actors (who ironically also end up paying publishers, for subscription fees to access papers). So the only possible argument left is that publishers are somehow beneficial to the science publishing process, which is a much weaker argument. Imagine if music sales did not bring any money to artists at all, but the music industry argued: "sure, music would get composed and recorded without us, but how could it be distributed without us?" This is the situation science is currently into. The only explanation to the current state of affairs is history (pre-Internet science distribution was complicated) and the unimaginable inertia of prestige.
- toyg 10y agoTo be fair, publishers also act as gatekeepers in a good sense, filtering out the worst crackpots by arranging peer review. That's the only reason they might have to survive in the web age. Music labels make a difference by marketing bands. Science publishers make a difference by formalizing peer-review. If these actors concentrated on their core differentiators, nobody would grudge them the money they make. The problem is, they don't; because the most vulturish and redundant aspects of their businesses are also the most profitable. For all the techno-utopianism in the world, this state of thing will not correct itself.
- bloaf 10y agoIt is true that they do currently provide that service, and that science should employ peer review, but to really defend the publishers you need to say that publishers are the only way that peer review can be arranged. I do not believe that is true.
- a3_nm 10y agoPublishers oversee peer review, but they are not the one performing it: unpaid researchers do. It is incredible, but, by and large, scientific publishers today are utterly ignorant about the science that they publish. (To my knowledge, the only exception to this rule is situations where scientific publishers pay small amounts of money to a scientist to act as an editor: but this only concerns some journals, and still the editor delegates peer review to unpaid reviewers.) In the music world: "Oh, but we are also necessary, because we choose which music to promote! Or rather, we arrange a room where unpaid critics tell us which ones to pick." (And of course, peer review can organize without scientific publishers. For instance, many conferences use EasyChair <http://www.easychair.org/> http://www.easychair.org/>, which is not perfect but at least does not claim copyright on articles. For such conferences, the only role of the publisher (if any) is to obtain a peer-reviewed body of articles, ask authors to sign copyright forms, and sometimes take care of formatting issues.)
- sergiotapia 10y agoIsn't scientific research paid for by tax payers? Isn't most of content on Sci hub of this nature? Who is profiting from selling this content?
- colejohnson66 10y agoElsevier and friends. There's a difference between funded by the government and made by the government. Things made by the government are public domain. However, things funded by the government are usually the property of the fundee(?). It's how SpaceX can have company secrets it doesn't have to release to the public domain.
- tgokh 10y agoThank you, Bayh-Dole Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act
- mordae 10y agoThe issue is with the impact factor.
- phantom_oracle 10y agoGive it time... Elsevier and co. will unite in a final push and buy the packaged-software that Hollywood uses for DMCAs to any sites that host these papers. Sci-Hub is just phase 1 of data liberation. Phase 2 is P2P, if it's not already there.
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoThe issue is that unlike music, the market for research papers isn't anywhere nearly as widespread, so average people don't have any incentive to seed research papers, whereas they do have an incentive to share blockbuster movies and music albums.
- hueving 10y agoWhat incentive do people have to share?
- zyxley 10y ago"I'll get kicked off the private tracker with all the good stuff if my seed ratio drops too low."
- lukaslalinsky 10y agoI don't think the average person would be using a private tracker.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- titanomachy 10y agoYou might be right, although it's worth considering that the bandwidth required for sharing scientific papers is orders of magnitude less than that needed for audio or video.
- eecc 10y agoIt's not there yet, but you can chime in and contribute (I'd appreciate code reviews, pull requests and so on...) Have a look at https://github.com/ecausarano/heron https://github.com/ecausarano/heron and let me know :)
- mordae 10y agoAt work at the National Library of Technology, Prague, Czech Republic and although this is in no way the opinion of my employer, I believe that I what I say represents the opinion of most of my colleagues in the actual library business: "Just give us the papers, we will make them available." The trouble here is that authors choose to pay Elsevier for publishing and libraries buy the papers back. In the end, it's all about "impact factor". They have to pay to publish in Nature because that's the only way for them to prove that they have, in fact, deserved the grant money and that they will get some more.
- mrb 10y agoYou won't find Sci-Hub on Google, so for those unfamiliar with it: the site is http://sci-hub.cc http://sci-hub.cc I remember being confused last year when I tried to find this "Sci-Hub thing". I stumbled on various sites that seemed to be it, except they were not. For example http://scihub.org/ http://scihub.org/ describes itself as a "global science and technology publisher and provides free access to research articles" except I couldn't actually find any research papers on their site. They are just some scamming company usurping Sci-Hub's brand.
- yladiz 10y agoMaybe it's because I saw it when I searched for it before, but when I searched "Scihub" on Google (without quotes) it was the first result.
- wongarsu 10y agosearching right now from germany: scihub has sci-hub.cc as first result, the wikipedia article second (wikipedia has the link ofc). The search term sci-hub has sci-hub.io as first result (which is down) and wikipedia as second result. DDG features the real sci-hub (with various domains, including onion proxies), wikipedia, sci-hub.org and sci-hub.com equally prominently depending on the exact search term.
- lucb1e 10y agoCan confirm. On google.de (also seaching from Germany, though with an en-US locale) it shows "sci hub" (with a space) as top suggestion when typing "sci". The top hit is: > Sci-Hub: устраняя преграды на пути распространения знаний But it is the original site. Clicking the link I get the English title. It probably throws off a lot of people though. Second is the Wikipedia article.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoSearching google for "scihub" (no quotes) from California has sci-hub.cc as the first result and the wikipedia article second. I don't know where this complaint came from.
- tajen 10y agoHow do they source papers? I can't find this detail neither in the article nor in Sci-Hub's "about" page. Do they install a peer-to-peer client on the machines of volunteers, so that Elsevier can't make the difference between a scientist and a pirate scientist? Why then Elsevier doesn't tag each paper with spelling mistakes so that they can trace the researcher who pirated the paper? And, last point, ...should we just give up about copyright protection? Any country who wants to advance (Russia, now China) needs to cheat on the WTO, it makes everyone less free and it doesn't work. Even software companies don't rely on copyright anymore - Microsoft sells to OEMs, not to end-users, and selling SAAS helps prevent the code from being published because the BSA approach dosn't work.
- unimpressive 10y ago>Microsoft sells to OEMs, not to end-users Microsoft relies on copyright for that.
- cooper12 10y agoI've used it and it seems to use a proxy connection to computers that have appropriate access to download the paper, and then it caches it server-side for any future requests. And many journals actually have prominent lines on the side of every page saying "Downloaded by [name] on [date]"; I'm guessing it doesn't deter them for whatever reason though.
- Houshalter 10y agoCopyright law is ridiculous and needs to be reformed immediately. We should give up the battle with Disney. They have billions of dollars to throw at politicians and lobbyists to ensure the Mouse never goes out of copyright (even though they treat it more as a trademark, and couldn't care less whether people watch the original steamboat willy cartoons on youtube.) But scientific research is different. Nonfiction work in general is different. Why should vastly different categories of works, with different values to society, economics, etc, be treated the same by copyright law? I propose we vastly decrease the restrictions of copyright on at least nonfiction works. Make them enter the public domain sooner, make it more difficult to register for copyright, perhaps require renewal half way through to prove the work is still economical, etc. It's just obscene that the vast majority of humanity's knowledge is locked away behind copyright ridiculousness. Journals charge obscene prices to access papers, which were often funded with public money. Works sit behind copyright barriers long after the author's death and they fall out of print. The internet could be much greater than it is. I mean sure there is a ton of content on the internet already, and wikipedia has been fantastic and collecting the world's knowledge. But there is so much stuff that only exists in books and papers, that should be publicly accessible. See also the science section on Public Domain Day: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2015/pre-1976 https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2015/pre-1976 and https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2016/pre-1976 https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2016/pre-1976
- zyxley 10y ago> perhaps require renewal half way through to prove the work is still economical, etc. This reminds me of one of the copyright reform ideas I've seen that has a tremendously practical approach to the power of the Mouse: an initial 20- or 40-year term, with an indefinite number of renewals of the same length allowed, but each renewal requiring filing with the Library of Congress and a substantial fee.
- userbinator 10y agobut each renewal requiring filing with the Library of Congress and a substantial fee. I believe the idea was to make the fee increase exponentially too.
- lintiwen 10y agoscience papers should be free to the public, at least the money should go to the researchers, not publishers.
- sndean 10y agoAs a researcher, I don't think the money should go to the researchers. Mostly because I'd be scared to see what'd happen when research (and wanting to publish in high impact journals) is completely money-driven. Simply, the papers should be made immediately free to the public.
- woodandsteel 10y agoI hope this is backed up in case Elbakyan isn't able to run it anymore. Sounds like a case for IPFS, though I don't know if it is up to it yet. Maybe she should just pass around some HD's.
- lucb1e 10y agoBeware my faulty RAM from '93, but I think I remember reading there are various people mirroring it for various reasons (archiving but also to take it to places where the site, or the Internet, is unavailable).
- matchagaucho 10y agoGovernment funded research should be public domain. Not really 'piracy' if taxes paid for it.
- avs733 10y agoThis, to me, is not dissimilar from the argument HN had over copyrighting law a little while back.
- matchagaucho 10y agoDistribution and ownership of intellectual property are really 2 separate issues. Researchers absolutely must own their IP as an incentive to advance and commercialize their work. But if the work is funded by taxes, then distribution should somehow flow back to the public (DoD classified works aside).
- avs733 10y agoI think that your separation is probably a useful framework for discussing it. However, I disagree with your conclusion. Work funded by the people should be owned by the people. That funding includes the payment of salaries which are the incentivization. Their role is to advance their fields, it is what they are paid to do, reviewed on, promoted by, etc.. I would see no bigger problem in requiring researchers to sign over rights than others do in asking employees to sign over rights to their employers. It is/should be an expectation of the role.
- red_blobs 10y agoThis will only hurt the science community. You need money to fund these publications and the scientists that are leaking the publications aren't actually funding the research with their own money. A better idea would be to fund publications yourself (with your own money) and release all of the information for free. But it takes much more talent, intelligence, and discipline to do something like this, which most people don't have.
- dlgeek 10y agoThe money to/from the publication doesn't fund the research or the author, or even the peer reviewers, just the journal itself.
- titanomachy 10y agoYeah, the peer reviewers work for free and the authors actually pay to be in the journal. It's a deeply broken system.
- frayesto 10y agoAs a graduate student, I've been quite determined to post all of my papers and code to github/arxiv/personal website. Most journals allow you to freely distribute pre-prints, and most researchers I know do this very frequently. The entire scientific publication environment is quite convoluted but there is a large effort for open publications.
- frayesto 10y agoI'm a young graduate student and face this on a continual basis. Articles are difficult to find because our university does not pay the subscription charges. I need to publish my work in quality journals, all of which charge high publication charges. Some are even higher if you want a 'public access' option. Luckily, there is a growing movement for open research and open publication. Many researchers, myself included, will publish pre-prints and papers to arxiv or self-host them on personal websites. I'm extremely grateful for sci-hub and just hope I can help end this stifling of scientific research in my own way. All of my work ends up on github/arxiv for anyone to use.
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- todd8 10y agoRight now there is a paper I'd like to read from a journal that I used to enjoy as a grad student, Software Practice & Experience. It's $38 dollars to download a PDF of a 7 page article from 1991. It probably doesn't contain information that I need so I guess I'll skip it--too bad. I do want to point out to HN readers that an ACM professional membership costs around $100/year. I think this is a deal because for $100/year more you get access to essentially all of articles published in all of the very numerous past and present journals. Student memberships are much much cheaper. I have also had IEEE memberships to order to get access to their online library of IEEE publications. For some jobs, these memberships are worth it. All other journals, like Software Practice and Experience, are just too expensive for me to access on-line. Fortunately, some of these are available in large university library systems.
- tzs 10y ago"Software Practice and Experience" is available on Deepdyve.com, a service that is more obscure than it should be. A quick summary would be Spotify for journal articles. With a free account you can view articles online, but only for 5 minutes each (I'm not sure if that is 5 minutes once, or 5 minutes per day). That should be enough to let you determine whether or not that 7 page article you are interested in has the information that you need. If it does have the information you want, there are two options to purchase online access to the article without the 5 minute time limit. You can use an access token, which are sold in 5 packs for $20. Or you can purchase a subscription, with is $40/month ($30/month if you buy 12 months worth at once), which gives unlimited access to all the journal articles they have, and 20 pages per month for printing. If all you will ever need is that one particle, then Deepdyve is still expensive: it will cost you $20 for online access assuming you buy the access token pack and only use one token. But if you are going to need more articles now and then, then the access token approach works out to $4 per article. If you will need several a month, the subscription can be a good deal. Of course, open access would be better, but if what you want is not available that way, Deepdyve can be a good way to get articles without going broke in the process.
- fernly 10y agoJust imagine an alternate world in which Elsevier et.al. used common sense, and offered all papers for a reasonable fee, like 1 euro per download, with a fraction paid to the authors. They could be generating 50 million euros a month and be regarded as good guys.
- AndyNemmity 10y agoAnd as in most situations like this (vast majority), a company won't disrupt itself.
- lukaslalinsky 10y agoI don't think 1 euro or 30 euro per download would make much difference. When you are downloading a paper, you don't know if it's going to be useful to you at all. If you work for a company/university, a bulk subscription makes more sense. If you are a student or hobyist, paying 1 euro every time you want to check out a paper is a good enough reason to download it from sci-hub instead.
- kam 10y ago> The site had its original URL removed, but you can still find it easily. Why isn't this a link? Why isn't there a link to http://sci-hub.cc/ http://sci-hub.cc/ anywhere in this article? Linking isn't illegal.
- Frogolocalypse 10y agoIt was the reason I installed TOR on my computer the other day. All of the sci-hub mirrors seem to have been shut-down, but the onion site is still up, and there's little chance that one is going to get closed down.
- dang 10y agoWe changed the URL from https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/29/sci-hub-is-providing-science-publishers-with-their-napster-moment/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/29/sci-hub-is-providing-scien..., which points to this.
- eecc 10y agoWow, this article hits so close to what annoys me the most of the whole issue about access. But the comments about peer review are even more interesting, so I'm chiming in with the hope of finding some people willing to contribute :) For the past couple years I've been hacking at https://github.com/ecausarano/heron/ https://github.com/ecausarano/heron/ (caveat: pet project, no code reviews, buggy and incomplete, I'm not the best developer you've ever met.) The main idea is to bundle a P2P Kademlia based redundant storage and index with PGP signing. Users sign and publish their papers on the network, build their academic WOT and filter out crackpots and other rubbish by ignoring query results originating outside their peer circle. In their role of peers, users "review and endorse" papers by signing them with their individual key. Over time you get a globally distributed repository where everybody chips in some CPU, network and storage, cannot go down unless the internet implodes, and is legal. At that point journals become pointless and we win! ;) Contributors very welcome
- ef4 10y agoSurprised nobody has already pointed out why the high traffic from Ashburn, VA is "hard to interpret". That is the home of one of the biggest AWS data centers. It would be an obvious place to run bulk downloading of sci-hub content. It's also an easy place to host a VPN server, which users may be motivated to do if their ISPs are blocking sci-hub.
- larrypress 10y agoI wrote a positive review of Sci-Hub in February (http://cis471.blogspot.com/2016/02/sci-hub-site-with-open-and-pirated.html http://cis471.blogspot.com/2016/02/sci-hub-site-with-open-an... ), but just retried it and it failed. I tried retrieving a couple of my old articles from the Communications of the ACM as well as one from the current issue and got nothing but error messages -- "too many redirects" and "500 Internal Server Error." Perhaps they are just having temporary problems.
- ska 10y agoThere are two really compelling arguments for Sci-Hub, regardless of the arguments against. Firstly, the usability is far, far better than almost all publishing industry offerings. Secondly, there has never been a realistic general pricing model for individual (or small companies, which amounts to the same thing) use of individual papers. There are some orgs (e.g. IEEE) which make this reasonable for an individual who primarily need access to core journals they produce, but even that is unrealistic for individuals with broader needs. The problem is that the industry was built around, and remains focused on, broad access licensing to large scale organizations (universities, government agencies, large corporations). There is no concept of "retail" access. That is a different business than they are in, and mostly they don't show any real interest in learning it.
- grkvlt 10y agoI used to lament the loss of access to journals when our company moved out of its offices in the University, where we were on the UK academic network JANET. However, I then discovered that as a graduate of the University of Edinburgh I had alumnus access to many publishers. There include Springer (where I can download papers, journal articles, chapters and even eBooks as epub or PDF) and also JSTOR, Sage, T&F and many others. I have a library account as an alumnus that gives me access through the UK access management federation Shibboleth system, which you can usually find as a login option on the paywall page trying to get you to purchase the full text for thirty dollars. I recommend that University graduates check to see if their libraries order a similar system? Of course, not all publishers offer this access, the University library only had deals with some of them, so I do find myself using sci-hub as well; but I try and access things legally first, so that the University and the publisher can see that there is demand for the alumnus access option, and it is being actively used...
- wsha 10y agoThe current system of journal publication has odd incentives -- paying to be published and doing peer review for free -- and should be revised in some way. Unfortunately though the journals provide the metric by which basically all researchers are judged. I agree that the world would be a better place if research were freely available, but the way Sci-Hub is doing this does not help the process, unless it stresses the system so bad financially that it breaks and is replaced by something else. I have wondered about the possibility of all articles being hosted freely on sites like arxiv.org with some kind of web of trust rating system: anyone could vote up an article but people in specific fields could choose to view the aggregate rating of respected researchers in their field. In any case, until a better rating system for researchers emerges, we can't get rid of the journal publishers.