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Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription journals are doomed
- fsloth 9y agoBasically, the publishers asked for this. Denying open access to old papers from humanitys point of view is wastefull. The planet is full of hungry minds. Who knows where the next Ramanujan comes from and which discipline he or she chooses but given the non existent transaction cost of reading an old paper it would be beyond silly if they could not do it for free.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoPublishers can provide value, and should not be forced to do so at a loss. Peer review, curating for quality, editing, typesetting, and creating physical copies could be expensive. True, current publishers don't compensate peer reviewers, limit curation to the set of people who will pay their submission fee, force editing and typesetting back on the authors, and charge egregious fees disproportionate to the cost of distribution. But the concept of the business isn't invalid.
- infogulch 9y agoNobody cares if publishers could theoretically add value in some alternate universe. In practice, none of them do. This isn't throwing the baby out with the bath water, this is people trying to stop this nasty ass bath water from being thrown out because there used to be a baby in it.
- paulgb 9y agoWonderfully said.
- Aeolun 9y agoWorking at one, I have to say I don't think this is true for all publishers. Prices are a different thing, but I'm definitely spending my day here adding value.
- fsloth 9y agoSome think anything can be open sourced but that does not work in the current world where we live. For an obvious example SpaceX could not have been an open source project. I suppose the general notion is that the only problem publishers solve is the distribution which is kinda non-value-adding nowadays, but don't think about the editorial process, which needs actual work. Sure, I think you guys add value. My critique was towards the cost of old papers and the ownership which journals take for published work. You guys need to get paid but the world also needs it's open access to the scientific corpus. The papers which have very little value adding editorial input do have a harder time legitimizing their slice of the pie, though.
- Mathnerd314 9y agoMaybe not open source, but an open hardware project. The particular problem for SpaceX is that a lot of the IP is covered by ITAR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_... See this FAQ entry: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/faq/company#wiki_what_patents_do_spacex_hold.3F_would_they_consider_releasing_them_like_tesla_motors_did.3F https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/faq/company#wiki_what_p... But in theory it's possible, e.g. Facebook's Open Compute Project, it just needs the right kind of funding model.
- Aeolun 9y agoTo be honest, there's a lot of things that could be done differently. It's just a matter of finding a way to do it that doesn't jeopardize the entire business.
- soVeryTired 9y agoHonest question: what is it you do that adds value?
- moyix 9y agoYeah, just to spell out how things work in CS for the things you mentioned: > Peer review Organized and performed by volunteers. > curating for quality Ditto. > editing, typesetting Done by authors (LaTeX isn't perfect, but it gets you "good enough" typesetting. And the last time a journal edited a paper of mine they mangled it because the person editing wasn't familiar with technical topics & jargon). > creating physical copies No one needs these any more; they just print the PDF if necessary.
- fsloth 9y agoSure, I think organizing the peer review process has some merit. I don't have an opinion if that's the optimal way to do it. Thus I wrote that older papers should be available for free. If not hosted on the journal servers then available free of copy right issues elsewhere.
- mirimir 9y agoSure, they can. If they don't extract monopoly-level rents.
- 4bpp 9y agoNobody is talking about forcing publishers to do anything, though. If demanding free access to electronic copies of papers actually makes their business untenable as they claim, they should put their money where their mouth is and shut it down; at that point, based on what will replace it, we will see how much value they actually added to society.
- Ar-Curunir 9y agoThey do none of that now; they provide nothing of value; they only ride on the coattails of prestigious venues and on the backs of reviewers' hard work.
- Thriptic 9y agoI disagree. Journal publishers provide value by crafting in house editorials and industry news pieces, soliciting review papers on pertinent topics, suggesting editorials for controversial works, and by filtering out obviously crappy manuscripts. High quality, higher impact journals (Science, Nature, NEJM, JAMA etc) do these things and I believe they add a lot of value. Lower impact journals are basically glorified FTP front ends. They don't create content, validate that content, editorialize that content, or even select that content. They just host and charge an enormous premium for it.
- taneq 9y ago> Publishers can provide value [...] That's like saying that dictatorships can be a superior form of government, because they provide centralized planning and decision making at a much lower overall cost. True, current dictatorships don't do so... but the concept isn't invalid.
- icelancer 9y ago>Publishers can provide value, and should not be forced to do so at a loss. Yes, they can. But they don't. >Peer review, Free. Volunteers. >curating for quality, editing, typesetting, They don't do this. You are expected to do it all. Your papers are sent back for revisions and/or rejected by peer review editors and reviewers, who again, work for free. >and creating physical copies could be expensive. Physical copies cost additional money to acquire anyway.
- yladiz 9y ago> Free. Volunteers. I don't think this is a good solution, because in reality reviewing these papers is complicated work for people who have spent years, often times decades, in their field. They do deserve to be paid. I do think publishers provide tangible, real value, but often the value they provide is significantly outweighed by the problems that arise from the way they run their businesses.
- icelancer 9y ago>I don't think this is a good solution, because in reality reviewing these papers is complicated work for people who have spent years, often times decades, in their field. They do deserve to be paid. I absolutely agree. But this is not how it works and suggestions to pay reviewers is usually met with haughty academic nonsense. Publishers in academia (and in the normal book industry, to boot) add near zero value while extracting huge fees.
- rumcajz 9y agoEasy. Make raw articles public, then let publishers do the the value-add and sell the result.
- mirimir 9y agoYes, they priced themselves out of their market.
- koolba 9y agoSo is Sci-Hub like Oink[1] for scientific papers? EDIT: For those not familiar, Oink was a torrenting site but what distinguished it from the tons of other sites was how highly curated it was. High quality audio, proper grouping and genres, and best of all you could request anything that was missing and the community would magically add it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace
- philipkglass 9y agoA lot of papers get ingested into sci-hub while they're still in the preprint/early-access stage. Sci-hub doesn't appear to reingest papers after the final version is published. It's one of my very few gripes about the system. A more quality-focused system would probably handle this edge case.
- poppingtonic 9y agoThis seems more like a versioning issue. Can't papers that pass review get a new DOI? I'm thinking something like semver for scientific papers or scientific data, more generally. DOIs even look like semver versions, so why not add more space for the different stages of publishing?
- philipkglass 9y agoI'm talking about papers like this: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b06335 http://sci-hub.cc/10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b06335 It's already passed peer review, but the final version will be tidied up with additional editing and will have e.g. the line-by-line numbering stripped out. I see sci-hub versions of papers from months ago, or older, that never update to the final edition. The content doesn't differ much but the final version may have better-placed figures, corrected typos, and other minor improvements.
- aw3c2 9y agoIf different versions of a paper have different DOI then the DOI is broken and should be replaced by something better. I consider it a heresy that some sites (fuck ResearchGate, Academia.edu) consider it fine to alter the PDFs. Document integrity should be the holy grail. Files should be final and never get touched. If they are, they are different.
- return0 9y agoThe Noah's Pirate Ark that will save all of humanity's knowledge from unreliable publishers.
- headcanon 9y agoThe change won't be immediate though. I don't think universities, which are journals' bread and butter, are going to stop their subscriptions anytime soon. Stopping a journal subscription because everyone is using sci-hub anyway (even if they researchers really are on an individual basis) might open the door for copyright suits against the universities, which would undoubtably be more expensive than just keeping the subs going, especially since its just a line item in an accountant's book. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but journals might have enough time for some to pivot to some more nuanced business model before they go bust.
- z1mm32m4n 9y agoThat being said, think about the other lines in the accountants books that could be better funded if universities didn't have to pay for journal subscriptions. That funding could go towards hiring more professors, paying professors better, hiring more research assistants, outfitting research labs better, etc. If we aren't paying researchers for peer review, the journal pay wall is just a net loss in productivity. It's just one more useless middleman.
- exhilaration 9y ago...if universities didn't have to pay for journal subscriptions. That funding could go towards hiring more professors... And more lawyers! If the journals did sue the universities it would be a one time legal cost to defeat them (thereby driving them out of business) versus the ongoing and growing cost of journal subscriptions.
- teraflop 9y agoUm, I know our legal system isn't perfect, but the outcome of a court case is still largely decided by, you know, actual laws and facts. You can't just throw money at some lawyers and assume you get to "defeat" whoever you want. I totally agree with the position that for-profit journals are bad for the research community, but is there any doubt that legally they have the right to charge universities for the content that they own the rights to?
- welder 9y agoGood riddance, limiting access to scientific articles is a detriment to the advancement of humanity.
- isoprophlex 9y agoThe sooner all these assholes go out of business, the better I hope scihub has a well thought out exit plan, in case of seizure. ~ 40 M files, at 1 MB each (my own estimate). I hope they have backups / insurance files with all the papers collected this far. Given the data volume it's not trivial but surely not impossible.
- th0br0 9y agoThey backup to Library Genesis as far as I understand it, Library Genesis is available via Torrents & Usenet - http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoYes, if you have a seedbox or something please host a few random parts! I have three or four hosted pieces and there aren't too many peers.
- icebraining 9y agoIs there any way to tell which torrents have fewer seeds, without having to add them all to my client?
- stevenhuang 9y agoI would like to know as well.
- icebraining 9y agoSee my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870697
- philipkglass 9y agoI don't think that sci-hub is going to kill off institutional journal subscriptions in the developed world. It's similar to how developed-country universities didn't stop buying licensed software and start passing around cracked versions to their faculty and students. Journal revenue isn't going to plummet like CD sales after Napster, because it's not individuals doing most of the purchasing in the first place. Individuals and institutions in poor countries may well turn to sci-hub. I certainly have. But I would venture that not much of the journals' revenue came from individuals or poor institutions in the first place. I didn't pay to read paywalled papers before sci-hub either; I got them via authors' sites or personal contacts, or just didn't get to read them at all.
- ballenf 9y agoTend to agree. There might even be an argument that SciHub provides something of a pressure release valve that will allow paywalls to continue. Similar to how pirated Windows copies can be said to have helped solidify Windows' market share. Or even, in my own mind, how pirated Adobe applications helped people learn the tools and go on to work at companies with legitimate licenses. Elsevier, et al, can now make a legitimate claim that they are not restricting access to those who cannot afford a sub. But their tax on academia will continue.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurus3 9y agoI was surprised that it's still considered rude to link to sci-hub: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714577#14715252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714577#14715252 Anyone know if this is a typical sentiment? I'm just curious if it's true that many researchers are offended by this movement, and what the reasons are. I firmly believe that there are always two sides to any topic, so we should explore the flipside. What are some arguments against blatantly opening up access to paywalled articles?
- isoprophlex 9y agoI was a small time academic once, and I shared all my stuff by linking to scihub. My university paid 500-2000€ / article in extortion errrrr i mean publishing fees. That should be more than enough.
- carbocation 9y agoIf someone were to post a link to a pirated version of one of my academic publications in a Hacker News discussion with me, I would be relieved that I didn't have to do it myself to let people see it.
- currymj 9y agofurther down, the author in question says he supports sci-hub and is happy to see it linked so that more people can read his work. he was just surprised that someone would post a link so blatantly to a pirate site. on the other hand, he says that he knows researchers who would be upset by this but doesn't give their rationale.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoYeah, I should've clarified that I was curious about the people he mentioned. Researchers contribute some of the most valuable comments to HN, so mainly I wanted to avoid making them feel unwelcome. If linking to sci-hub ends up shooing them off HN, it's not worth the cost. It seems like the sentiment is in the other direction, though. Maybe most researchers don't care.
- 9y ago
- joelthelion 9y agoIf only. I'm convinced they will find a way to shut her down.
- dekhn 9y agoThe origin of the web was to disseminate scientific knowledge. The guardians of that knowledge- the journal publishers- have absolutely failed to make a viable business model out of this, while many companies who adopted the web made billions. While I do not use Sci-Hub, I think that users who use it are doing so morally and ethically (in the sense of conscientious objection). i hope they are also willing to pay penalties if they are found to be violating copyright (this is generally considered a requirement for intential protest).
- TeMPOraL 9y agoSciHub shows the way papers should work on the Internet. The other day in a HN discussion, someone cited a paper in response to my comment. I was able, in 30 seconds, get to the full text of that paper, which allowed me to reevaluate my opinion in context of what I read. This is how science can, and should be useful for individuals. And beyond arXiv and SciHub, it generally isn't.
- benbreen 9y agoI'm an academic and fully making research open access. But when I read discussions like this I always wonder about the people who work at journals. The process of peer-review, copy-editing, and online publication is not something that can be done for free. Granted, the current journal publishers spend too much money on overhead, and I certainly don't support the for-profit ones like Elsevier that rake in huge profits. But I also don't see much allowance made for the fact that publishing research in a peer-reviewed format involves labor which should continue to be compensated in some way (incidentally, it's not entirely true that researchers themselves aren't compensated - publishing offers an indirect benefit but a real one in the sense that publications are directly linked to salary increases down the line).
- pizza 9y agoWould it make sense for the peer review to be uncoupled from the distribution? I don't know about if this were physical, but, digitally, if e.g. ACMEcorp serves the paper, and if review team 1, team 2, etc.. can all attach their signatures of peer review in e.g. PeerDB, doesn't that make the review more transparent and detangle incentives?
- sonium 9y agoThis will be a catalyst for open-access
- Spivak 9y agoYeah, but open access is just 'stuff the cost of publishing into the grant application' and because journals make money for each work published it encourages rubber stamp reviewing and publishing noise. Open access is probably a net good, but it just shifts the costs around.
- jabl 9y agoThere's stuff like the fair open access manifesto: https://fairoa.org/ https://fairoa.org/ . I suppose that's partly a backlash against predatory open access journals that publish any rubbish as long as (significant) fees are paid..
- vbuwivbiu 9y agoand it's better than all of their websites!
- sixdimensional 9y agoSo, fundamental question here - if scientific articles (or anything that can be copy protected, etc.) can be released online in this manner to "free the knowledge", and yet, given such free access, there are still people that will pay for a subscription to access the same scientific articles, wouldn't that be the best solution? I see people commenting that just because of this release, universities won't cancel their subscriptions to the journals. Well, that would be great - let them keep paying, while the content also gets out for free. This is like the trend where you can pay what you want for stuff, or nothing. I wonder if that model would apply to scientific research - pay what you want for the paper, or nothing - but if you want to support that research.. hopefully people would still pay. Just thinking out loud... probably already been thought of or wouldn't work (or I'm just self-defeatist). :)
- JoshTriplett 9y agoI'd rather see that money put into actual research rather than paying for access to free things. And approximately none of those funds go to pay for research.
- sixdimensional 9y agoAgreed.. is that like saying that researchers should do a "pay what you want for my paper" online and self publish/host the knowledge? Maybe somebody just needs to provide a standard "pay what you want" feature that academics can embed easily into their own site, and then self-publish / host.
- Spivak 9y agoDo you think pay to cite would be a good model?
- sixdimensional 9y agoHmm, that's interesting - I think maybe that's just like licensing, right? Except in this case, the licensor is the researcher/author and the licensee is the author citing the source? Combining the two thoughts, "suggested payment to cite" with a "pay what you want" model could interesting too. I suppose this would be a direct transfer of value from those who want to build knowledge on other people's work, to those who did the work. As long as it was not unduly expensive to do so, maybe - after all, the saying goes "paying my dues". I would think you wouldn't want to inhibit or slow down people from building on knowledge either (which is what things like Sci-Hub seem to be trying to avoid). I wrote a few published papers some time ago, and I was told that without citations, a paper would be rejected as academic research should always be based on enhancements or references to prior work. So it seems kind of built in to the mechanism that citations are the requirement to build knowledge on top of when creating such works. It would be interesting to see how a model like this could work. Since the value created by the researcher is essentially part of a web of value, it might be hard to determine who should get credit. For example, we have 3 existing papers, A, B and C, and one new paper, D. Paper A cites paper B, which cites paper C - and all of them are additive to our knowledge base. Therefore, as the author of paper D, if we were to pay to cite paper A, should that also include some payment to the authors of paper B and C too? I suppose one addition you could add to this - payment to only LIVING researcher(s)/author(s). If the researcher/author is deceased, then the payment stops. In this regard, it sounds like royalty/licensing fees.
- biomcgary 9y agoI've met the author of the study, Daniel Himmelstein, who is quite passionate about making information free. Projects in his github account (https://github.com/dhimmel https://github.com/dhimmel) tend to use a CC0 license. Some of his work involves aggregation of data (e.g., https://github.com/dhimmel/hetionet https://github.com/dhimmel/hetionet) that is encumbered and he has put a lot of effort into making it as free as possible. His project carefully documents the license for each data point and he took the time to ask copyright holders that do not provide an explicit license to do so.
- philipkglass 9y agoI had quite a bit of exposure to pirate journal archives before sci-hub arrived. A couple of easy improvements that I saw with past pirate libraries, that it'd be nice to have on sci-hub: - Strip download watermarks ("Downloaded by Wisconsin State University xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on January 12, 2017 13:45:12"). Many times, journals published by the same publisher do the watermarking similarly so you need write just one pdftk (or other PDF manipulation software) script for every journal under their banner. At worst, it's a one-script-per journal effort. - PDF optimization. A lot of publishers produce un-optimized PDFs that could be 25% (or more) smaller with a completely lossless space optimization pass. This should save storage/network costs for access to individual papers and, more importantly, reduce the burden for bulk mirrors. (I'd contribute the scripted passes myself if I had contacts within sci-hub.)
- mkl 9y agoI deal with making PDFs a lot, and some of my processing steps (using pdfjam) make the file size explode. Currently I have no efficient way to make them smaller again. I would love to see how you do it.
- philipkglass 9y agoThe Multivalent PDF tool is still my go-to. It hasn't been updated in ages, but the jar still works fine: http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/download.html http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/download.html If you run java tool.pdf.Compress file.pdf it will generate file-o.pdf and often trim quite a bit of weight. That's probably what I would suggest sci-hub use too because it's easy to use and automatic. EDIT: this looks quite promising too: https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt But it has bugs with handling some images... converts them to black boxes. I'd only use this one if you manually verify the result first (so not a fully scripted process). (Or this could be due to me not installing all the bleeding edge dependencies from source as instructed.)
- mkl 9y agoThanks. I didn't try Multivalent as I didn't have a Java VM. Maybe I should take another look. I tried pdfsizeopt, and IIRC it didn't actually reduce my particular PDFs.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI'm very happy to see SciHub going strong - for all the obvious reasons. Now let's just hope they back up to IPFS (if they do, I'll happily pin some of it). I want to go off a tangent here, though. Now that open access (whether arXiv or SciHub style) is becoming the norm, I wonder what can be done to improve the format of scientific papers? Like e.g. making them more like this: http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt/ http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt... instead of regular PDFs?
- StavrosK 9y agoI came here to say the exact same thing. A friend and I made a pinning service two weeks ago (www.eternum.io) and we'd be happy to donate some space/bandwidth by pinning a subset of the papers.
- scrollaway 9y agoImproving and advocating for standard methods of data publishing accompanying scientific papers would be great. That and promoting open source (including open-sourcing the papers themselves, as in the source text and algorithms used to generate the accompanying resources etc).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lucb1e 9y agoI don't know what that link is, but after 10 seconds of loading over LTE I gave up in favor of my data bundle. I hope it doesn't go towards whatever that is. Personally I'm a big fan of blog posts: they're written for a broader audience in understandable language. I don't have any trouble reading English, but papers are almost universally written in a way that is more complicated than necessary. And in blog posts, if someone made a "novel new algorithm", at least you can be sure there's code, raw test data, screenshots, or whatever else is needed to DIY. And someone on the web is talking about it, perhaps even with comments below the post itself.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
- revelation 9y agoDoes Sci-Hub actually have all the papers or are they just retrieving them on-demand? Publishers are tracking mass downloads (see the Aaron Swartz case) so given some of the very obscure papers I've retrieved from Sci-Hub I assume it's unlikely they downloaded them beforehand. My go-to assumption for how it works is that a bunch of people have donated access to their university network access and Sci-Hub is just a load-balancing / cache layer.
- philipkglass 9y agoYes, it lazy-loads papers using credentials from institutional subscribers and then stores them for fast retrieval. When you're the first person to request a paper you'll see an animation of a biphenyl molecule rotating while the site fetches the paper from an institution with access. Sometimes, there is no corresponding institution with access currently hooked up to sci-hub and the retrieval process fails. But I've only seen that happen a few times.
- bogomipz 9y agoCan someone who's familiar with this research paper subscription model that is threatened a la Elsevier explain to me how we got here? I am curious if at one time did Universities publish these independently and were they more accessible to the public? When did this practice of restricting access to papers via subscriptions begin?
- dougmccune 9y agoThis long article about Robert Maxwell does a great job answering your question: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
- bogomipz 9y agoThis is a really fascinating read. Thanks! Cheers.
- agumonkey 9y agoAnybody mirrored (or attempted to do so) libgen ?
- mcappleton 9y agoIt's not just the publishing industry that is the problem. It is merely a symptom of the greater malaise in higher education as a whole. The focus is on degrees, not on true learning. So much of what occurs is in universities is total waste. But people put up with it to get the paper. As long as people keep blindly giving absurd sums of money to get the paper, these expensive publications will last. The answer is for people to wake up and value learning over a diploma. When that happens, then finally issues like this will go away. Heck, as a bunch of people have pointed out, many of these papers aren't even for real learning. They are worded in such a way as to make them sound smart to their peers, but unintelligible to the public.
- lacismiles 9y agoYes and it's no good if who you referring to is smart enough to read between the lines
- drewda 9y agoI'm all for Sci-Hub disrupting the dominance of RELX Group (a.k.a. Elsevier) and other for-profit publishers that make such a big profit off the backs of researchers (who write and edit for free) and grant-making organizations (who fund those researchers). But it's unfortunate that Sci-Hub is also disrupting non-profit scholarly associations that cover their own budgets through journal subscriptions. In these cases, the fact that libraries and readers have to pay for access to an article is somewhat balanced out by the fact that those fees are going to pay for staff, conferences, and the other worthwhile activities of the non-profit associations.
- darawk 9y agoThe death of for-profit scientific journal companies will be a beautiful thing for the world. It's really rare to see something that is so purely valueless. This industry is sort of unicornlike - they've managed to extract rents in an area where they add literally zero value. It's truly an amazing thing, and it will be even more amazing to watch it die.
- kazinator 9y agoThey should expand into engineering: I don't see any IEEE or ISO standards in there, for instance.
- turc1656 9y agoLooks like Aaron Swartz's vision for the free, collective ownership of mankind's scientific knowledge is well on its way. I wish he were still alive to see Sci-Hub in action.
- andrepd 9y agoThanks! That reminds me I should donate to Sci-Hub!
- CorvusCrypto 9y agoHow does this doom subscription journals? I mean it would be nice but realistically it just means they move to exploit the university subscriptions since the professors can't admit use of illegally obtained copies. They can further exploit the authors since many journals require payment from the author for submission and some journals charge in the hundreds. One might say "just publish to a different journal" but it's not that easy. Because of the heavy reliance on Impact Factor in scientific publishing, it is the journals with those high impact factors that the authors will try to publish to. Regardless of whether or not they are being pirated. This is sad to say, but in reality I think this isn't going to massively impact things for the publishers. Academia at its core is where the problem lies. Sure paid subscriptions are a big part of things, but it's the stuff most don't realize (the authorship fees and institution sub fees) that give the publishers power.
- peterburkimsher 9y agoA similar corollary is the continued use of TI calculators in school. The hardware is ancient. It's really overpriced. https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/ But they're still selling lots! Why? They're approved by the examination boards, and have an effective monopoly. (oligopoly if you include HP and Casio, but most schools choose one brand and require all students to fall in line). The academic market is not remotely capitalist, so even though there are cheaper & better options available that people will use in everyday life, the "official" results will still use the officially-sanctioned products.
- x0x0 9y agoIt dooms subscription journals because it breaks their leverage. Right now, publishers offer take it or leave it bundles of hundreds of journals at prices the publisher set. If a library doesn't want to pay, the library/university system loses access to everything. And many people at the university can't do their work without such access. SciHub existing allows negotiators for the universities and libraries to shrug and say whatever when Elsevier threatens to cut access to every Elsevier journal.
- CorvusCrypto 9y ago
- icelancer 9y agoAlexandra Elbakyan's work is one of the most positive and important things to happen in the last 3 decades in the field of science, which has been gradually losing its luster due to the bastardization and devaluation of the field by politicians and salespeople using it like hucksters. Elbakyan's work has inspired me to only publish my work in jornals that embrace open access and open data. I'll be damned if I am a slave to impact factor and other haughty metrics.
- return0 9y agoThe academic world has missed some decades of advancement of communication. In a world where all published science is open for meta-processing, the burden of validating science would shift to search engines. There would be search engines competing with scientific-SEO of course, but in the medium-run this would improve scientific writing, and possibly speed up science in general. In the end there will always be some private actors doing the work of "ranking" scientists. Academics are hanging on to the current peer-review journals precisely because they don't want to give that power to other actors.
- filedrawer 9y agoI work for a scholarly publisher and I'd be very interested in hearing about what—aside from cost—would cause you to go to Sci-Hub for a paper? Is it reading experience? Site performance? Difficulty in navigating publishers' sites? Are there any good experiences you can point to? I'm really interested in making this better.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- daveheq 9y agoNow if we could get the government version of this...
- pdimitar 9y agoI'll be that guy who will gladly eat some downvotes for this apparently unpopular opinion: "Science" and "subscription" (or any monetary incentive) don't compute in a single sentence. Aren't scientists funded by governments and/or corporations? Why should anyone pay them a royalty above that? It's a legit question and not trolling, don't mistake my slightly angry tone for degrading please.