18 ms·

Science’s Pirate Queen

496 points by IntronExon 9y ago

rasengan0 9y ago
Who's the thief? and who are they hurting? I have a response but that comment reply will cost 0.000000001BTC
romwell 9y ago
Knew from the title it's going to be about SciHub. As someone who is just out of a grad programme and no longer has access to the university network, I'm incredibly thankful to her. I wish putting papers on ArXiV were the norm in all disciplines, not just math/physics/cs, but until that happens, this is the answer (and when it does, SciHub will essentially become a mirror). The licensing deals that the publishers have made with countries like Germany are still extortion, and aren't a solution. You can learn more about SciHub, and LibGin (a similar project for science books which mirrors SciHub articles) from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub The Wiki page also lists mirrors, in case any of the domains are blocked. If you have some bitcoin to spare, SciHub is donation-supported, and you can help the fight to make science available to the people that do it - and everyone else. ---------------------------- For those out of the loop: currently, access to papers done by scientists (paid for by government/their home institution), typeset by the same scientists, reviewed by their peers (for free) and distributed electronically costs bug bucks to access. The publishers still cite hosting/maintenance costs as a justification, and yet when someone manages to do the same for free (e.g. SciHub), the publishers go to war. SciHub demonstrates that hosting costs are not a justification for atrocious access fees (to the tune of $30 to see one paper!), and yet the racketeering scheme (a relic from the days of Guttenberg's press) still, somehow, persists. To address this problem, people in certain disciplines (math, physics) currently publish their pre-prints online on sites like ArXiV and their own university pages. However, these self-publication methods are not peer-reviewed, and so are not a direct solution to the problem. Some big-name scientists have started open-access online journals, but it's hard to get everyone on board, as academic performance evaluations are based on publications in well-established journals -- so only established academics can afford to be published in new journals when more established alternatives are present, but have little motivation to do so, since the university pays the access fee anyway. SciHub is the interim solution to this chicken-and-egg problem. The long-term solution is still SciHub, but legal. Alexandra Elbakyan has done the footwork on the implementation side, the rest of the battle is going to be social (getting the academics on board) and legal (preventing the publishers like Elsevier from crushing the initiative, and, in the long run, destroying their monopoly on providing access to government-funded research altogether -- which means, effectively, wiping them out altogether). All of this is talked about in the article in more detail.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  It's LibGen, not LibGin.
  - userbinator 9y ago
    In another era, LibGin is a library about illicit alcoholic beverage production.
    - romwell 9y ago
      This would be ginious!
  - romwell 9y ago
    Thanks, it's too late to edit the typo now :) It's still библиотека колхоз in my mind (a predecessor whose contents was merged into LibGen).
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  LibGen is a great concept, and I have uploaded a lot of my own scans of scholarly material there, but I fear it is sort of collapsing under its own weight now. Its contents will continue to remain available thanks to their smart decision to decentralize it (torrents are available to download and seed the material). However, there is absolutely no curating of LibGen’s holdings. That means that a lot of metadata is wrong or incomplete, and some books are uploaded in a dozen different versions and you don’t know which ones are high-quality and which ones are low-quality scans or outright corrupt files. LibGen is just the latest in a long series of pirate ebook libraries that have popped up and then been either shut down by copyright holders or abandoned by admins. It’ll eventually give way to another, and hopefully the next generation will maintain its strengths while having higher-quality metadata.
  - ss248 9y ago
    >That means that a lot of metadata is wrong or incomplete, and some books are uploaded in a dozen different versions and you don’t know which ones are high-quality and which ones are low-quality scans or outright corrupt files. The rule of the thumb is to ignore the metadata and just look for the highest id number.
namelost 9y ago
That same year, the AAP and Elsevier also supported and lobbied in favor of a bill that would have prevented the government from requiring agencies to make research published through a journal Open Access at any point I realize I shouldn't be surprised, but that shocked me. God forbid taxpayers should have access to the research they paid for. How these organizations expect any public sympathy is beyond me.
- spystath 9y ago
  In comparison several European countries are increasingly mandating that publicly funded research should be open access. Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me. However Open Access is not panacea. Most of the times it just moves the cost from the subscriber to the author. The open access costs are equally extortionate for several journals in the ballpark of £2000 for a single article. As a result publicly funded grants must also include a quite significant budget for publishing costs further inflating the already bloated administrative overhead of research programmes. So you either pay the journals to open up your article or pay for a subscription. It does increase visibility and accessibility of research but, still, we are not quite there yet.
  - garmaine 9y ago
    > Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me. Money.
    - theGimp 9y ago
      Does money not exist in Europe?
      - vecr25 9y ago
        I'm pretty sure we have that thing here too.
      - incompatible 9y ago
        I suspect politicians in Europe are less dependent on private contributions.
meri_dian 9y ago
Here's one thing I don't understand about the call for open access. Academic papers are not read by the general public because they are dense and usually very technical, accessible to researchers in that field but not really to many others. Given this, the subtext to arguments for open access that journal fees are stifling scientific awareness or potential research by depriving the public seems incorrect. Because a relatively small specialist community actually consumes scientific literature, I don't see paid journals as some egregious societal inefficiency. Universities make so much money nowadays that it's certainly a travesty if researchers have to pay for access to these journals themselves, but the point remains that it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal that the public doesn't have free access to scientific journals.
- na85 9y ago
  My taxes go to funding a lot of this research. I am paying for it already, so why do I need to pay for it again?
  - eesmith 9y ago
    In an abstract sense (meaning, not coupled to the current economic situation), the journals provide archival services. This may include scanning old publications, OCR'ing them, and making them available for search and retrieval; a service which wasn't expected when the research was done. This may include continuing content curation. I have sent corrections to a journal because their system contained incorrect information, such as in incomplete title. In one case they combined two letters to the editor into a single DOI entry, and needed to break it into two. They have staff which can handle those corrections, and those staff need to be paid. They may also provide addition search capabilities beyond the free ones available from, say, Google Scholar, and they may update the interfaces for improved usability and for better integration with tools like citation managers. While I don't see how those activities justify the current high prices, I disagree with the idea that public funding for the original research means there should be no additional funding for continued archiving and access.
- goolulusaurs 9y ago
  Maybe a larger portion of the public would read academic papers if they had access to them.
Finnucane 9y ago
"Publishing powerhouses like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have estimated its internal cost per-article to be around $3,700. Nature, meanwhile, says that each article sets it back around $30,000 to $40,000" I work in book publishing, not journals, so I may be missing something in Nature's internal structure, but that seems like a lot to spend on one article. As in I think we spend less than that to do a whole book.
- a_bonobo 9y ago
  Those numbers can't be right, honestly. Bjoern Brembs has been writing a lot about open access publishing and the costs associated, here he cites a few numbers: >There is ample material on how much the publication of a scholarly open-access article costs. SciELO publishes for under US$100 per article. SciELO, however, publishes largely in regions of the world where labor and other associated costs are comparatively low. How much costs do other organizations cite? The Open Library of Humanities is on the record with about US$500, Ubiquity, Hindawi and PeerJ are also on record within the US$100-500 range and Scholastica, RIO Journal, Science Open, F1000Research or arpha mention similar figures. Thus, there are now about ten different companies or organizations which all agree that open access publishing costs about US$100-500 and Independent analysts agree: it is established that the actual costs of publishing a scholarly article are in the low hundreds of US$. Note that he focuses on open access articles, not closed access + open access articles, but I can't think of a reason why closed access would cost more. http://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/11/is-a-cost-neutral-transition-to-open-access-realistic/ http://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/11/is-a-cost-neutral-transitio...
  - sampo 9y ago
    > Those numbers can't be right, honestly. Just a very rough calculation: If Nature has a staff of around 150 [1], each paid $100,000 year, 50 issues per year, 20 research articles per issue. This gives 150 times 100,000/(50 times 20) = $15,000 per article. My numbers are probably off in more than one way. [1] https://www.nature.com/nature/about/journal-staff https://www.nature.com/nature/about/journal-staff
incompatible 9y ago
It's interesting how Elbakyan generally receives only praise in discussions like this. Do no supporters of capitalism want to denounce this self-styled communist and complain about the harm done to the profits of law-abiding businesses like Elsevier?
- faitswulff 9y ago
  Law-abiding is by no means synonymous with good, or even neutral in a moral sense. Obligatory reposting of old HN content (especially under the section "Is Elsevier really so evil?"): "Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier–and think you shouldn’t either" http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-review-for-or-publish-with-elsevier-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-r... I'm also discovering that law-abiding is as much a reputation as a technicality. Companies get away with breaking the law all the time. They just aren't universally or publicly punished for it.
  - incompatible 9y ago
    I'm not sure that morality would be an issue. The duty of companies in a capitalist system is simply to make money for their owners. If profit is maximised by selling fewer copies for higher fees, that's what they are supposed to do.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-management/columns/the-purpose-of-business-is-not-to-make-a-profi https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-management/columns/the-... http://thecro.com/topics/25115/the-myth-of-the-profit-motive/ http://thecro.com/topics/25115/the-myth-of-the-profit-motive... https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v... https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-making-money-is-not-enough/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-making-money-is-not-...
mirimir 9y ago
Requisite: http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion
MaysonL 9y ago
I wonder what would happen if Apple bought Elsevier, and made all of its journals available on any Apple device for $100/yr? A reasonable thing to do with its cash hoard, no? Amazon, or Bezos, could probably raise the money to swing a hostile takeover.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > I wonder what would happen if Apple bought Elsevier I'd much rather see them go down than be bought out.
- gowld 9y ago
  That wouldn't solve any problem, just shift the paywall to someone else.
killjoywashere 9y ago
First it was music, then it was movies, Google took books off the table by accident, now journal articles. You can see where this is going: small subscriptions for millions of subscribers world-wide. Amazon Prime, YouTube Red, or Spotify for scientists. My questions: 1) can I as an author get 30% like musicians on iTunes?, 2) will this make science more attractive as a career?
- Fomite 9y ago
  1) Probably not. People want to produce papers more than people want to consume papers. 2) Also probably not. Because most papers aren't read widely. The folks I know who have things that generate a small drip of royalties (usually licenses from patents) treat it as a nice little bit of fun-money, but it's nowhere near enough to either fund a lab or really change the calculus of "Is this job worth doing" from a monetary perspective. Especially when compared to "Fuck it, I'll go work for industry."
  - jobigoud 9y ago
    Based on bibliographic notes alone we can say that for each produced paper, a lot more are consumed.
    - gus_massa 9y ago
      Most of the references were also in the last paper of the authors, and will almost surreally be in the next paper. (And there are also self citations ...) I'd probably divide the number of citation in math by 3 and in physics by 5 to discount repetitions.
- b1daly 9y ago
  Musicians get 70% of retail is on iTunes downloads. (Or rather, the owners of the copyrights do.)
- Vinnl 9y ago
  As for your second question: please no. Of every 200 PhD students, only one ends up becoming a professor. Science is attractive enough as it is, despite pretty much every aspect of it (pay, overtime, job security, etc.) is abysmal.
philonoist 9y ago
In good old days, there used to be DC++. Currently I use what is touted as the best client for it AirDC++. Why can't peer to peer file sharing like Direct Connect be used for such purposes? People have successfully used i2p, torrents, emule,etc.? Can they be tracked and shut down?
- romwell 9y ago
  LibGen's contents can be donwloaded/distributed over torrents. Participate!
ggm 9y ago
We are all interacting with this HN website over technology whose very underpinnings was the assumption its freely available -The protocol stack, the application-to-protocol bindings, the definitions which a program source code represents, the compiler tools.. Am I alone in seeing the contradictions, of people defending for-profit science publishing, using a vehicle whose very existence is predicated on government funded science and technology coming with 'its free' as a requirement?
- indubitable 9y ago
  Without defending the current system of publication, many things that are government funded are not free. For instance, our ironically named freeways. And nearly all government offered services from postal to patents come with costs and fees, which can become quite obscene. --- @pwinnski - This is likely either a dialect or national language issue. In the US, at least the section where I am from, freeways are what you might call highways. They have no traffic lights, are high speed, and have toll booths for entry and spread along them at intervals. Hence the reason I stated their naming quite ironic! They are built by government, but are not freely available. Responding here since hacker news seems to stop you from replying in a thread once something you post has been mass downvoted.
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    I'm confused. Freeways are, in fact, free. Both in movement and in cost to use. If a highway charges tolls, it is not a freeway. If a highway has traffic lights, it is not a freeway. You may be conflating price with cost, but the two are not the same. The government funding of the cost of freeways means that the price is free to all users.
    - bjelkeman-again 9y ago
      In many countries there are taxes you have to pay to be allowed to use the roads.
      - 9y ago
wasx 9y ago
> But if America’s access were further restricted, it would be a blow to the site, and to many of the “capitalists” that use it. The Verge are definitely misunderstanding Elbakyan when she says this: >"the capitalists have started blocking Sci-Hub domains, so the site may not be accessible at the regular addresses." Elbakyan is referring to Elsevier and the ACS and the other major publishes putting pressure on SciHub and making it inaccessible. No capitalists are using the service in the Marxist sense of the word "capitalist" which is definitely what Elbakyan was going for. The Verge's writing here misrepresents what she's saying, and truly does change the message of what she has said. I think they need to edit and fix that.
- pcnix 9y ago
  Yeah, she seems to be making a point there that Verge's usage seems to be (unintentionally) obfuscating.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  Elbakyan says so herself as well: https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 And she'll go into more detail later: https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961836113731072003 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961836113731072003
aaavl2821 9y ago
The academic publishing model, and academic research in general, will be dramatically different in 15 years, maybe fewer In california, venture capital already funds more research than the NIH ($5B vs $1.5-2B). Much of this is one step later stage than academic research but increasingly they overlap directly. VC funding for life science research is skyrocketing, and NIH funding is declining. In January 2018 alone there was $1B invested in seed or series a biotech deals which is more than Stanford gets from the NIH in two years The fact is that the publication bias is ruining scientific quality. Anywhere from 40-75% of academic science isn't reproducible, either because of chance, poor quality control / documentation, cherry picking data or outright fraud. The list of researchers and universities that VCs and pharma will work with is quite small, and many VCs are just funding the basic science themselves rather than invest in stuff that just doesn't work half the time https://lifescivc.com/2011/03/academic-bias-biotech-failures/ https://lifescivc.com/2011/03/academic-bias-biotech-failures... Young scientists are treated horribly by the academic world, with brilliant PhDs and postdocs with 15 years of research experience in top labs making barely minimum wage with no hope of tenure. Many universities make it very hard for students to explore non academic jobs because they realize they have the most highly educated captive workforce the world has ever seen If a good alternative to working in academia opens up, things will change fast
- Fomite 9y ago
  You're off on the NIH extramural budget by a factor of >10X.
  - aaavl2821 9y ago
    I was referring to spending in CA although the I think I misquoted the figure as $1.5-2B; think it's $3.7B in ca Total NIH budget is like $32B. Half of that goes to basic research and some goes to non-life sci research. Life sci VC funding in 2017 was $15B. Some of that goes to admin costs obviously but not nearly as much as NIH if you look at headcount at companies https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/budget-in-brief/nih/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/budget-in-brief/nih/index.h...
    - 9y ago
indubitable 9y ago
Can somebody explain the exact process for free access that people would propose? Most options seem to come with significant and foreseeable 'unforeseen consequences.' For instance if the idea is that research is submitted to a private journal, as typical, but then the journal is not allowed to charge a fee then that is going to rather lower their prioritization of submissions from public research. A far worse idea would be government covering the journal fees which would do the exact opposite and overly incentivize public research as companies could send their publication fees through the roof and still have them paid due to government price insensitivity. Maybe another idea would to have a public government research journal where all research that received public funding is freely available. But this also runs into many problems. One would be that the fundamental point of a journal is to work as a filtering mechanism. We might argue that a lot of mediocre science gets published today, even in more reputable journals. And that's after some odd 80%+ of papers, for those more reputable journals, is rejected. A government clearing house would lose its purpose as a quality filter. And it would also run into the same problems as #1 if we then have the authors submit it in the private industry, where publishing rights/exclusivity are typically part of the model. So what's the idea?
- gowld 9y ago
  The problem is solved, save for entrenched incumbents. Open Access: PLoS https://www.plos.org/ https://www.plos.org/ Closed Access: (P)PNAS https://www.google.com/search?q=ppnas https://www.google.com/search?q=ppnas http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/04/breaking-pnas-changes-slogan/ http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/04/breaking-pnas-changes-slo... Closed Access journals DO NOT serve as a quality filter. The unpaid peer-reviewers serve as a quality filter (and often a poot one anyway).
  - indubitable 9y ago
    Of course you're right, but the review process is connected to the journal. PLoS journals are very accepting and so they end up being seen as a repository for publications that could not get published elsewhere. That's not to say nothing of value is published there, but rather that if you take a random paper from one of their journals, it's going to be of a different quality than a random paper from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. And like others have mentioned, a supplement is a great idea because of publication bias against things like negative results. However, I would again see this as supplementing and supplanting when I think most people here are gunning for the latter.
fwdpropaganda 9y ago
What's the reason this entire thing isn't already entirely over torrent?
- icelancer 9y ago
  It is. LibGen is available via torrent.
  - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    But no search function, is that it?
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
The article (and the discussion here) seems very focused on the legalities of Sci-Hub. But this misses the real question: Has there been a noticeable impact on general scientific progress as a result? I feel like there must at least be anecdotal stories of people reading, exploring and making connections they otherwise would not have been able to because free > $35/paper.
- icelancer 9y ago
  Yeah, me. My company is publishing six papers this year and a large mover forward is the ability to read all the papers in our industry fee-free. Elbakyan's work moved us so dramatically that I instituted a no-fee publication policy; we will only publish in fee-free, open access, and open peer review journals - providing all data and supplementary material openly to everyone either through the portal's site (if supported) or a public repository. EDIT: In my opinion Elbakyan should be considered one of the most important people of her generation. It is my belief that academia will see fit to write her out.
- pcnix 9y ago
  For any student not part of a university with a journal access program, Sci-Hub is a massive boon. I've not personally had this issue, but there are quite a few amazing post graduates that I know of who rely on Sci-Hub a fair amount.
- tzs 9y ago
  > I feel like there must at least be anecdotal stories of people reading, exploring and making connections they otherwise would not have been able to because free > $35/paper. And I wonder how many of those people don't know about DeepDyve.com? It's essentially Spotify for journals. The $49/month ($30/month if you buy a yearly subscription) plan gives unlimited online access to most papers from a huge list of journals [1] from a huge list of publishers [2]. (There are also group plans available, but they don't list the prices for those on their website, as far as I can see). You can also buy 5 packs of rental tokens for $20. A rental token gives you access to an article for 30 days. People on the free plan get 5-minute full text previews, so you can at least skim an article to get a better idea if you want to consume a token to rent it. Open access is much nicer, of course, but most cases I've seen where someone says that the cost of non-open access, such as the $35/paper so many publishers charge if you buy directly through them, was a serious issue to their research would have been able to get those papers through DeepDyve at a cost well within their budget, but for some reason very few people in the wild seem to have heard of it even though it has been around for quite a while. [1] https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/journals?page=all https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/journals?page=all [2] https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/publishers https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/publishers
icelancer 9y ago
Sci-Hub's Twitter says there are "many inaccuracies" regarding the Verge article. https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856
ohum 9y ago
Sci-hub, and the availability of research, have been and is, something to be grateful for. It seems like fear is the motivating function for restriction of knowledge, and that is understandable. "Science's...Queen"
M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
Considering that scientific publishing is a racket[1], I find it very hard to have any sympathy whatsoever for the likes of Elsevier 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993603
wiz21c 9y ago
What is an "open" paper ? I mean, the paper is a very succinct description of the research done. For example, if one demonstrates how one builds a CNN but at the same time, doesn't provide the data set used to build it, then it's worthless. In the same vein, if one provides explanations on how to detect motion in a picture but doesn't provide the full source code of its detection pipeline, then it may be super tough to rebuild that code (because it assumes the paper actually gives all the necessary information, not the "general idea")) So, how open is open ?
- kuschku 9y ago
  This is why about 90% of the papers Google publishes are useless. They describe deep learning successes, with datasets that aren't public, on hardware that isn't public, with software that isn't public. They describe technologies, be it spanner, borg, flumejava or others, relying on closed hard- and software. If an average university professor can't replicate research 1:1 based solely on existing, open technology and the paper, the paper should not be accepted by any journal. In fact, it shouldn't even be accepted on conferences, or be able to get a doi code. That's not worthy of being called science.
  - remus 9y ago
    I don't think they're quite useless (they tend to contain some interesting ideas, which presumably work as google have generally implemented them) but as you say they're definitely not 'science' as they can't be replicated.
  - dagw 9y ago
    While I obviously agree that fully reproducible results is the ideal, just knowing that something is possible and having some idea where to start is often valuable in itself.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      First of all, if it’s not reproducible, it’s not science. The entire point of science is getting results that give insight to others. Second, often the papers set prerequisites that are not available to anyone else, because these, too, are undocumented. This is cool if you want an inspiration, but large parts of these papers are as useful as watching Star Trek for actual science. They can serve as inspiration, but they can’t tell you how to replicate something, or give you possible leads to expand on it. And this issue gets even worse – if I’m writing an undergrad thesis on a tech that Google has several years lead on, my thesis won’t be able to produce anything new. I can’t expand on the state of the art, because the state of the art isn’t even available to me.
afpx 9y ago
To me, Alexandra Elbakyan is kind of like a Martin Luther of science. That is, she enables the lay public to read and interpret science rather than awaiting the interpretation and approval of academics from high-status institutions. That may be a ‘sacrilege’ view here, given the audience of HN. And, in a way, I do feel somewhat nervous of people making decisions based on papers they read without understanding of the philosophy and practice of science. Yet, it’s unavoidable and already being done through popular journalism. With sci-hub (and with some reference books obtained via libgen), science becomes accessible to everyone with basic scientific literacy - a surprising large number of people. I see these two tools together as enablers of a new generation of scientists. For instance, recently I have seen many of my collegues and friends sending me direct links to research papers. That’s crazy and would have never happened just a few years ago. These tools will drive the democratization of science. Just as I now see the religious kids at the coffee shop discussing their scripture, I hope to soon see science kids there discussing classic science papers - doing it not for economic or career reasons, but simply to understand and discover. To me, that’s not an economic issue but one of morality.
- frostburg 9y ago
  "Basic scientific literacy" is not enough to read most papers (in part because most papers are badly written and need familiarity with the genre to be understood). Almost everyone that I know that uses sci-hub does so because it's faster than finding the correct institutional proxy, repository, login credentials, etc. that they would need otherwise (the sci-hub UX is vastly superior).
  - jly 9y ago
    The ability of a non-scientist to understand a paper at a useful level varies greatly based on the area of study and the reader's knowledge of the topic. 'Basic scientific literacy' may not be enough, but there are many more individuals with an amateur level of advanced understanding or interest in a given area who benefit greatly. I personally have no institutional access but I read a lot of papers that I can understand with an undergrad level of science background and a keen interest in a specific subject. I'm sure there are many others like this.
lambdadmitry 9y ago
Finally an article that dips into Elbakyan's worldview and motivations. I _hate_ the typical lazy coverage which projects American "civil rights hero" stereotype on her. She isn't, she is borderline crazy person (that is, self-proclaimed "communist" supporting Putin's crony capitalism) with no fear of consequences and with incentives aligned with the majority of scientific community. It can be made into a _much_ richer and personal story than your typical "fight the man" trope, but most journalists can't be bothered.
- jcloud_dev 9y ago
  I wish your comment was higher. You describe her personality quite accurately, based on what I know. That being said, "borderline crazy person with no fear of consequences" is the exactly the type of people that can push humanity forward. Richard Stallman is another example of such a person, I think. You have to be an extremist to make other players in the field to yield.
  - lambdadmitry 9y ago
    Yes, I guess you can do that comparison with Richard Stallman if you are willing to disregard what they stand for ("free as in freedom" vs "glory to Motherland").
    - bitwize 9y ago
      What about "¡Viva la Revolución!"? Stallman was an ardent supporter of the Chávez regime in Venezuela. It took him some years to realize that Chávez was, to put it mildly, kind of a dick.
degenerate 9y ago
@Sci_Hub twitter: "Unfortunately, the Verge article about Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has many inaccuracies" "I'm going to publish a separate blog post explaining the inaccuracies later" https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961836113731072003 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961836113731072003
frankzander 9y ago
Modern heros
ybrah 9y ago
I like to see this for what it is, piracy. If I want access to a paper, I have sci-hub and that's beneficial to me. I'm saying its a good thing. Sidenote: those pictures are creepy.
znpy 9y ago
I wonder if she needs financial support for lawyers and stuff. I would gladly make a donation.
- fg8qfg8fg8 9y ago
  there's only a bitcoin address on scihub's site
fg8qfg8fg8 9y ago
another thing I love about scihub is how fast it is - paste the DOI and boom it's there!
daddosi 9y ago
Dumb question: How make a free high impact journal?
- grzm 9y ago
  Rather than answer this outright (as I don't have a complete answer), I'd encourage you to imagine what some of the things that would make a high impact journal, one that you'd find useful. Even if you don't have all of the answers, that would move the ball forward a bit, and put some skin in the game/conversation, as it were. What would make the journal high impact? Would there be costs associated with that? If so, how would you fund it?

496 points by IntronExon 9y ago

Who's the thief? and who are they hurting? I have a response but that comment reply will cost 0.000000001BTC

Knew from the title it's going to be about SciHub. As someone who is just out of a grad programme and no longer has access to the university network, I'm incredibly thankful to her. I wish putting papers on ArXiV were the norm in all disciplines, not just math/physics/cs, but until that happens, this is the answer (and when it does, SciHub will essentially become a mirror). The licensing deals that the publishers have made with countries like Germany are still extortion, and aren't a solution. You can learn more about SciHub, and LibGin (a similar project for science books which mirrors SciHub articles) from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub The Wiki page also lists mirrors, in case any of the domains are blocked. If you have some bitcoin to spare, SciHub is donation-supported, and you can help the fight to make science available to the people that do it - and everyone else. ---------------------------- For those out of the loop: currently, access to papers done by scientists (paid for by government/their home institution), typeset by the same scientists, reviewed by their peers (for free) and distributed electronically costs bug bucks to access. The publishers still cite hosting/maintenance costs as a justification, and yet when someone manages to do the same for free (e.g. SciHub), the publishers go to war. SciHub demonstrates that hosting costs are not a justification for atrocious access fees (to the tune of $30 to see one paper!), and yet the racketeering scheme (a relic from the days of Guttenberg's press) still, somehow, persists. To address this problem, people in certain disciplines (math, physics) currently publish their pre-prints online on sites like ArXiV and their own university pages. However, these self-publication methods are not peer-reviewed, and so are not a direct solution to the problem. Some big-name scientists have started open-access online journals, but it's hard to get everyone on board, as academic performance evaluations are based on publications in well-established journals -- so only established academics can afford to be published in new journals when more established alternatives are present, but have little motivation to do so, since the university pays the access fee anyway. SciHub is the interim solution to this chicken-and-egg problem. The long-term solution is still SciHub, but legal. Alexandra Elbakyan has done the footwork on the implementation side, the rest of the battle is going to be social (getting the academics on board) and legal (preventing the publishers like Elsevier from crushing the initiative, and, in the long run, destroying their monopoly on providing access to government-funded research altogether -- which means, effectively, wiping them out altogether). All of this is talked about in the article in more detail.

Cyph0n 9y ago
It's LibGen, not LibGin.
- userbinator 9y ago
  In another era, LibGin is a library about illicit alcoholic beverage production.
  - romwell 9y ago
    This would be ginious!
- romwell 9y ago
  Thanks, it's too late to edit the typo now :) It's still библиотека колхоз in my mind (a predecessor whose contents was merged into LibGen).
Mediterraneo10 9y ago
LibGen is a great concept, and I have uploaded a lot of my own scans of scholarly material there, but I fear it is sort of collapsing under its own weight now. Its contents will continue to remain available thanks to their smart decision to decentralize it (torrents are available to download and seed the material). However, there is absolutely no curating of LibGen’s holdings. That means that a lot of metadata is wrong or incomplete, and some books are uploaded in a dozen different versions and you don’t know which ones are high-quality and which ones are low-quality scans or outright corrupt files. LibGen is just the latest in a long series of pirate ebook libraries that have popped up and then been either shut down by copyright holders or abandoned by admins. It’ll eventually give way to another, and hopefully the next generation will maintain its strengths while having higher-quality metadata.
- ss248 9y ago
  >That means that a lot of metadata is wrong or incomplete, and some books are uploaded in a dozen different versions and you don’t know which ones are high-quality and which ones are low-quality scans or outright corrupt files. The rule of the thumb is to ignore the metadata and just look for the highest id number.

namelost 9y ago

That same year, the AAP and Elsevier also supported and lobbied in favor of a bill that would have prevented the government from requiring agencies to make research published through a journal Open Access at any point I realize I shouldn't be surprised, but that shocked me. God forbid taxpayers should have access to the research they paid for. How these organizations expect any public sympathy is beyond me.

spystath 9y ago
In comparison several European countries are increasingly mandating that publicly funded research should be open access. Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me. However Open Access is not panacea. Most of the times it just moves the cost from the subscriber to the author. The open access costs are equally extortionate for several journals in the ballpark of £2000 for a single article. As a result publicly funded grants must also include a quite significant budget for publishing costs further inflating the already bloated administrative overhead of research programmes. So you either pay the journals to open up your article or pay for a subscription. It does increase visibility and accessibility of research but, still, we are not quite there yet.
- garmaine 9y ago
  > Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me. Money.
  - theGimp 9y ago
    Does money not exist in Europe?
    - vecr25 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure we have that thing here too.
    - incompatible 9y ago
      I suspect politicians in Europe are less dependent on private contributions.

meri_dian 9y ago

Here's one thing I don't understand about the call for open access. Academic papers are not read by the general public because they are dense and usually very technical, accessible to researchers in that field but not really to many others. Given this, the subtext to arguments for open access that journal fees are stifling scientific awareness or potential research by depriving the public seems incorrect. Because a relatively small specialist community actually consumes scientific literature, I don't see paid journals as some egregious societal inefficiency. Universities make so much money nowadays that it's certainly a travesty if researchers have to pay for access to these journals themselves, but the point remains that it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal that the public doesn't have free access to scientific journals.

na85 9y ago
My taxes go to funding a lot of this research. I am paying for it already, so why do I need to pay for it again?
- eesmith 9y ago
  In an abstract sense (meaning, not coupled to the current economic situation), the journals provide archival services. This may include scanning old publications, OCR'ing them, and making them available for search and retrieval; a service which wasn't expected when the research was done. This may include continuing content curation. I have sent corrections to a journal because their system contained incorrect information, such as in incomplete title. In one case they combined two letters to the editor into a single DOI entry, and needed to break it into two. They have staff which can handle those corrections, and those staff need to be paid. They may also provide addition search capabilities beyond the free ones available from, say, Google Scholar, and they may update the interfaces for improved usability and for better integration with tools like citation managers. While I don't see how those activities justify the current high prices, I disagree with the idea that public funding for the original research means there should be no additional funding for continued archiving and access.
goolulusaurs 9y ago
Maybe a larger portion of the public would read academic papers if they had access to them.

Finnucane 9y ago

"Publishing powerhouses like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have estimated its internal cost per-article to be around $3,700. Nature, meanwhile, says that each article sets it back around $30,000 to $40,000" I work in book publishing, not journals, so I may be missing something in Nature's internal structure, but that seems like a lot to spend on one article. As in I think we spend less than that to do a whole book.

a_bonobo 9y ago
Those numbers can't be right, honestly. Bjoern Brembs has been writing a lot about open access publishing and the costs associated, here he cites a few numbers: >There is ample material on how much the publication of a scholarly open-access article costs. SciELO publishes for under US$100 per article. SciELO, however, publishes largely in regions of the world where labor and other associated costs are comparatively low. How much costs do other organizations cite? The Open Library of Humanities is on the record with about US$500, Ubiquity, Hindawi and PeerJ are also on record within the US$100-500 range and Scholastica, RIO Journal, Science Open, F1000Research or arpha mention similar figures. Thus, there are now about ten different companies or organizations which all agree that open access publishing costs about US$100-500 and Independent analysts agree: it is established that the actual costs of publishing a scholarly article are in the low hundreds of US$. Note that he focuses on open access articles, not closed access + open access articles, but I can't think of a reason why closed access would cost more. http://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/11/is-a-cost-neutral-transition-to-open-access-realistic/ http://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/11/is-a-cost-neutral-transitio...
- sampo 9y ago
  > Those numbers can't be right, honestly. Just a very rough calculation: If Nature has a staff of around 150 [1], each paid $100,000 year, 50 issues per year, 20 research articles per issue. This gives 150 times 100,000/(50 times 20) = $15,000 per article. My numbers are probably off in more than one way. [1] https://www.nature.com/nature/about/journal-staff https://www.nature.com/nature/about/journal-staff

incompatible 9y ago

It's interesting how Elbakyan generally receives only praise in discussions like this. Do no supporters of capitalism want to denounce this self-styled communist and complain about the harm done to the profits of law-abiding businesses like Elsevier?

faitswulff 9y ago
Law-abiding is by no means synonymous with good, or even neutral in a moral sense. Obligatory reposting of old HN content (especially under the section "Is Elsevier really so evil?"): "Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier–and think you shouldn’t either" http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-review-for-or-publish-with-elsevier-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-r... I'm also discovering that law-abiding is as much a reputation as a technicality. Companies get away with breaking the law all the time. They just aren't universally or publicly punished for it.
- incompatible 9y ago
  I'm not sure that morality would be an issue. The duty of companies in a capitalist system is simply to make money for their owners. If profit is maximised by selling fewer copies for higher fees, that's what they are supposed to do.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-management/columns/the-purpose-of-business-is-not-to-make-a-profi https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-management/columns/the-... http://thecro.com/topics/25115/the-myth-of-the-profit-motive/ http://thecro.com/topics/25115/the-myth-of-the-profit-motive... https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v... https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-making-money-is-not-enough/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-making-money-is-not-...

mirimir 9y ago

Requisite: http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion

MaysonL 9y ago

I wonder what would happen if Apple bought Elsevier, and made all of its journals available on any Apple device for $100/yr? A reasonable thing to do with its cash hoard, no? Amazon, or Bezos, could probably raise the money to swing a hostile takeover.

jacquesm 9y ago
> I wonder what would happen if Apple bought Elsevier I'd much rather see them go down than be bought out.
gowld 9y ago
That wouldn't solve any problem, just shift the paywall to someone else.

killjoywashere 9y ago

First it was music, then it was movies, Google took books off the table by accident, now journal articles. You can see where this is going: small subscriptions for millions of subscribers world-wide. Amazon Prime, YouTube Red, or Spotify for scientists. My questions: 1) can I as an author get 30% like musicians on iTunes?, 2) will this make science more attractive as a career?

Fomite 9y ago
1) Probably not. People want to produce papers more than people want to consume papers. 2) Also probably not. Because most papers aren't read widely. The folks I know who have things that generate a small drip of royalties (usually licenses from patents) treat it as a nice little bit of fun-money, but it's nowhere near enough to either fund a lab or really change the calculus of "Is this job worth doing" from a monetary perspective. Especially when compared to "Fuck it, I'll go work for industry."
- jobigoud 9y ago
  Based on bibliographic notes alone we can say that for each produced paper, a lot more are consumed.
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    Most of the references were also in the last paper of the authors, and will almost surreally be in the next paper. (And there are also self citations ...) I'd probably divide the number of citation in math by 3 and in physics by 5 to discount repetitions.
b1daly 9y ago
Musicians get 70% of retail is on iTunes downloads. (Or rather, the owners of the copyrights do.)
Vinnl 9y ago
As for your second question: please no. Of every 200 PhD students, only one ends up becoming a professor. Science is attractive enough as it is, despite pretty much every aspect of it (pay, overtime, job security, etc.) is abysmal.

philonoist 9y ago

In good old days, there used to be DC++. Currently I use what is touted as the best client for it AirDC++. Why can't peer to peer file sharing like Direct Connect be used for such purposes? People have successfully used i2p, torrents, emule,etc.? Can they be tracked and shut down?

romwell 9y ago
LibGen's contents can be donwloaded/distributed over torrents. Participate!

ggm 9y ago

We are all interacting with this HN website over technology whose very underpinnings was the assumption its freely available -The protocol stack, the application-to-protocol bindings, the definitions which a program source code represents, the compiler tools.. Am I alone in seeing the contradictions, of people defending for-profit science publishing, using a vehicle whose very existence is predicated on government funded science and technology coming with 'its free' as a requirement?

indubitable 9y ago
Without defending the current system of publication, many things that are government funded are not free. For instance, our ironically named freeways. And nearly all government offered services from postal to patents come with costs and fees, which can become quite obscene. --- @pwinnski - This is likely either a dialect or national language issue. In the US, at least the section where I am from, freeways are what you might call highways. They have no traffic lights, are high speed, and have toll booths for entry and spread along them at intervals. Hence the reason I stated their naming quite ironic! They are built by government, but are not freely available. Responding here since hacker news seems to stop you from replying in a thread once something you post has been mass downvoted.
- pwinnski 9y ago
  I'm confused. Freeways are, in fact, free. Both in movement and in cost to use. If a highway charges tolls, it is not a freeway. If a highway has traffic lights, it is not a freeway. You may be conflating price with cost, but the two are not the same. The government funding of the cost of freeways means that the price is free to all users.
  - bjelkeman-again 9y ago
    In many countries there are taxes you have to pay to be allowed to use the roads.
    - 9y ago

wasx 9y ago

> But if America’s access were further restricted, it would be a blow to the site, and to many of the “capitalists” that use it. The Verge are definitely misunderstanding Elbakyan when she says this: >"the capitalists have started blocking Sci-Hub domains, so the site may not be accessible at the regular addresses." Elbakyan is referring to Elsevier and the ACS and the other major publishes putting pressure on SciHub and making it inaccessible. No capitalists are using the service in the Marxist sense of the word "capitalist" which is definitely what Elbakyan was going for. The Verge's writing here misrepresents what she's saying, and truly does change the message of what she has said. I think they need to edit and fix that.

pcnix 9y ago
Yeah, she seems to be making a point there that Verge's usage seems to be (unintentionally) obfuscating.
Vinnl 9y ago
Elbakyan says so herself as well: https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 And she'll go into more detail later: https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961836113731072003 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961836113731072003

aaavl2821 9y ago

The academic publishing model, and academic research in general, will be dramatically different in 15 years, maybe fewer In california, venture capital already funds more research than the NIH ($5B vs $1.5-2B). Much of this is one step later stage than academic research but increasingly they overlap directly. VC funding for life science research is skyrocketing, and NIH funding is declining. In January 2018 alone there was $1B invested in seed or series a biotech deals which is more than Stanford gets from the NIH in two years The fact is that the publication bias is ruining scientific quality. Anywhere from 40-75% of academic science isn't reproducible, either because of chance, poor quality control / documentation, cherry picking data or outright fraud. The list of researchers and universities that VCs and pharma will work with is quite small, and many VCs are just funding the basic science themselves rather than invest in stuff that just doesn't work half the time https://lifescivc.com/2011/03/academic-bias-biotech-failures/ https://lifescivc.com/2011/03/academic-bias-biotech-failures... Young scientists are treated horribly by the academic world, with brilliant PhDs and postdocs with 15 years of research experience in top labs making barely minimum wage with no hope of tenure. Many universities make it very hard for students to explore non academic jobs because they realize they have the most highly educated captive workforce the world has ever seen If a good alternative to working in academia opens up, things will change fast

Fomite 9y ago
You're off on the NIH extramural budget by a factor of >10X.
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  I was referring to spending in CA although the I think I misquoted the figure as $1.5-2B; think it's $3.7B in ca Total NIH budget is like $32B. Half of that goes to basic research and some goes to non-life sci research. Life sci VC funding in 2017 was $15B. Some of that goes to admin costs obviously but not nearly as much as NIH if you look at headcount at companies https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/budget-in-brief/nih/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/budget-in-brief/nih/index.h...
  - 9y ago

indubitable 9y ago

Can somebody explain the exact process for free access that people would propose? Most options seem to come with significant and foreseeable 'unforeseen consequences.' For instance if the idea is that research is submitted to a private journal, as typical, but then the journal is not allowed to charge a fee then that is going to rather lower their prioritization of submissions from public research. A far worse idea would be government covering the journal fees which would do the exact opposite and overly incentivize public research as companies could send their publication fees through the roof and still have them paid due to government price insensitivity. Maybe another idea would to have a public government research journal where all research that received public funding is freely available. But this also runs into many problems. One would be that the fundamental point of a journal is to work as a filtering mechanism. We might argue that a lot of mediocre science gets published today, even in more reputable journals. And that's after some odd 80%+ of papers, for those more reputable journals, is rejected. A government clearing house would lose its purpose as a quality filter. And it would also run into the same problems as #1 if we then have the authors submit it in the private industry, where publishing rights/exclusivity are typically part of the model. So what's the idea?

gowld 9y ago
The problem is solved, save for entrenched incumbents. Open Access: PLoS https://www.plos.org/ https://www.plos.org/ Closed Access: (P)PNAS https://www.google.com/search?q=ppnas https://www.google.com/search?q=ppnas http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/04/breaking-pnas-changes-slogan/ http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/04/breaking-pnas-changes-slo... Closed Access journals DO NOT serve as a quality filter. The unpaid peer-reviewers serve as a quality filter (and often a poot one anyway).
- indubitable 9y ago
  Of course you're right, but the review process is connected to the journal. PLoS journals are very accepting and so they end up being seen as a repository for publications that could not get published elsewhere. That's not to say nothing of value is published there, but rather that if you take a random paper from one of their journals, it's going to be of a different quality than a random paper from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. And like others have mentioned, a supplement is a great idea because of publication bias against things like negative results. However, I would again see this as supplementing and supplanting when I think most people here are gunning for the latter.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago

What's the reason this entire thing isn't already entirely over torrent?

icelancer 9y ago
It is. LibGen is available via torrent.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  But no search function, is that it?

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

The article (and the discussion here) seems very focused on the legalities of Sci-Hub. But this misses the real question: Has there been a noticeable impact on general scientific progress as a result? I feel like there must at least be anecdotal stories of people reading, exploring and making connections they otherwise would not have been able to because free > $35/paper.

icelancer 9y ago
Yeah, me. My company is publishing six papers this year and a large mover forward is the ability to read all the papers in our industry fee-free. Elbakyan's work moved us so dramatically that I instituted a no-fee publication policy; we will only publish in fee-free, open access, and open peer review journals - providing all data and supplementary material openly to everyone either through the portal's site (if supported) or a public repository. EDIT: In my opinion Elbakyan should be considered one of the most important people of her generation. It is my belief that academia will see fit to write her out.
pcnix 9y ago
For any student not part of a university with a journal access program, Sci-Hub is a massive boon. I've not personally had this issue, but there are quite a few amazing post graduates that I know of who rely on Sci-Hub a fair amount.
tzs 9y ago
> I feel like there must at least be anecdotal stories of people reading, exploring and making connections they otherwise would not have been able to because free > $35/paper. And I wonder how many of those people don't know about DeepDyve.com? It's essentially Spotify for journals. The $49/month ($30/month if you buy a yearly subscription) plan gives unlimited online access to most papers from a huge list of journals [1] from a huge list of publishers [2]. (There are also group plans available, but they don't list the prices for those on their website, as far as I can see). You can also buy 5 packs of rental tokens for $20. A rental token gives you access to an article for 30 days. People on the free plan get 5-minute full text previews, so you can at least skim an article to get a better idea if you want to consume a token to rent it. Open access is much nicer, of course, but most cases I've seen where someone says that the cost of non-open access, such as the $35/paper so many publishers charge if you buy directly through them, was a serious issue to their research would have been able to get those papers through DeepDyve at a cost well within their budget, but for some reason very few people in the wild seem to have heard of it even though it has been around for quite a while. [1] https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/journals?page=all https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/journals?page=all [2] https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/publishers https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/publishers

icelancer 9y ago

Sci-Hub's Twitter says there are "many inaccuracies" regarding the Verge article. https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856

ohum 9y ago

Sci-hub, and the availability of research, have been and is, something to be grateful for. It seems like fear is the motivating function for restriction of knowledge, and that is understandable. "Science's...Queen"

M_Bakhtiari 9y ago

Considering that scientific publishing is a racket[1], I find it very hard to have any sympathy whatsoever for the likes of Elsevier 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993603

wiz21c 9y ago

What is an "open" paper ? I mean, the paper is a very succinct description of the research done. For example, if one demonstrates how one builds a CNN but at the same time, doesn't provide the data set used to build it, then it's worthless. In the same vein, if one provides explanations on how to detect motion in a picture but doesn't provide the full source code of its detection pipeline, then it may be super tough to rebuild that code (because it assumes the paper actually gives all the necessary information, not the "general idea")) So, how open is open ?

kuschku 9y ago
This is why about 90% of the papers Google publishes are useless. They describe deep learning successes, with datasets that aren't public, on hardware that isn't public, with software that isn't public. They describe technologies, be it spanner, borg, flumejava or others, relying on closed hard- and software. If an average university professor can't replicate research 1:1 based solely on existing, open technology and the paper, the paper should not be accepted by any journal. In fact, it shouldn't even be accepted on conferences, or be able to get a doi code. That's not worthy of being called science.
- remus 9y ago
  I don't think they're quite useless (they tend to contain some interesting ideas, which presumably work as google have generally implemented them) but as you say they're definitely not 'science' as they can't be replicated.
- dagw 9y ago
  While I obviously agree that fully reproducible results is the ideal, just knowing that something is possible and having some idea where to start is often valuable in itself.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    First of all, if it’s not reproducible, it’s not science. The entire point of science is getting results that give insight to others. Second, often the papers set prerequisites that are not available to anyone else, because these, too, are undocumented. This is cool if you want an inspiration, but large parts of these papers are as useful as watching Star Trek for actual science. They can serve as inspiration, but they can’t tell you how to replicate something, or give you possible leads to expand on it. And this issue gets even worse – if I’m writing an undergrad thesis on a tech that Google has several years lead on, my thesis won’t be able to produce anything new. I can’t expand on the state of the art, because the state of the art isn’t even available to me.

afpx 9y ago

To me, Alexandra Elbakyan is kind of like a Martin Luther of science. That is, she enables the lay public to read and interpret science rather than awaiting the interpretation and approval of academics from high-status institutions. That may be a ‘sacrilege’ view here, given the audience of HN. And, in a way, I do feel somewhat nervous of people making decisions based on papers they read without understanding of the philosophy and practice of science. Yet, it’s unavoidable and already being done through popular journalism. With sci-hub (and with some reference books obtained via libgen), science becomes accessible to everyone with basic scientific literacy - a surprising large number of people. I see these two tools together as enablers of a new generation of scientists. For instance, recently I have seen many of my collegues and friends sending me direct links to research papers. That’s crazy and would have never happened just a few years ago. These tools will drive the democratization of science. Just as I now see the religious kids at the coffee shop discussing their scripture, I hope to soon see science kids there discussing classic science papers - doing it not for economic or career reasons, but simply to understand and discover. To me, that’s not an economic issue but one of morality.

frostburg 9y ago
"Basic scientific literacy" is not enough to read most papers (in part because most papers are badly written and need familiarity with the genre to be understood). Almost everyone that I know that uses sci-hub does so because it's faster than finding the correct institutional proxy, repository, login credentials, etc. that they would need otherwise (the sci-hub UX is vastly superior).
- jly 9y ago
  The ability of a non-scientist to understand a paper at a useful level varies greatly based on the area of study and the reader's knowledge of the topic. 'Basic scientific literacy' may not be enough, but there are many more individuals with an amateur level of advanced understanding or interest in a given area who benefit greatly. I personally have no institutional access but I read a lot of papers that I can understand with an undergrad level of science background and a keen interest in a specific subject. I'm sure there are many others like this.

lambdadmitry 9y ago

Finally an article that dips into Elbakyan's worldview and motivations. I _hate_ the typical lazy coverage which projects American "civil rights hero" stereotype on her. She isn't, she is borderline crazy person (that is, self-proclaimed "communist" supporting Putin's crony capitalism) with no fear of consequences and with incentives aligned with the majority of scientific community. It can be made into a _much_ richer and personal story than your typical "fight the man" trope, but most journalists can't be bothered.

jcloud_dev 9y ago
I wish your comment was higher. You describe her personality quite accurately, based on what I know. That being said, "borderline crazy person with no fear of consequences" is the exactly the type of people that can push humanity forward. Richard Stallman is another example of such a person, I think. You have to be an extremist to make other players in the field to yield.
- lambdadmitry 9y ago
  Yes, I guess you can do that comparison with Richard Stallman if you are willing to disregard what they stand for ("free as in freedom" vs "glory to Motherland").
  - bitwize 9y ago
    What about "¡Viva la Revolución!"? Stallman was an ardent supporter of the Chávez regime in Venezuela. It took him some years to realize that Chávez was, to put it mildly, kind of a dick.

degenerate 9y ago

@Sci_Hub twitter: "Unfortunately, the Verge article about Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has many inaccuracies" "I'm going to publish a separate blog post explaining the inaccuracies later" https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961829490803449856 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961836113731072003 https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/961836113731072003

frankzander 9y ago

Modern heros

ybrah 9y ago

I like to see this for what it is, piracy. If I want access to a paper, I have sci-hub and that's beneficial to me. I'm saying its a good thing. Sidenote: those pictures are creepy.

znpy 9y ago

I wonder if she needs financial support for lawyers and stuff. I would gladly make a donation.

fg8qfg8fg8 9y ago
there's only a bitcoin address on scihub's site

fg8qfg8fg8 9y ago

another thing I love about scihub is how fast it is - paste the DOI and boom it's there!

daddosi 9y ago

Dumb question: How make a free high impact journal?

grzm 9y ago
Rather than answer this outright (as I don't have a complete answer), I'd encourage you to imagine what some of the things that would make a high impact journal, one that you'd find useful. Even if you don't have all of the answers, that would move the ball forward a bit, and put some skin in the game/conversation, as it were. What would make the journal high impact? Would there be costs associated with that? If so, how would you fund it?