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Not being in a scientific field, one of the previous times this came up I asked if any of the working scientists felt like SciHub had positively impacted their

Not being in a scientific field, one of the previous times this came up I asked if any of the working scientists felt like SciHub had positively impacted their work: exposing them to more papers than they would have read, guiding them in different ways, etc. and the answer was a pretty overwhelming "ohmygodyes". From the outside, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a public good. It certainly seems like literally the entire world is benefitting from this (including the scientists involved in the publishing) and its being held back by a handful of publishers.

Kognito 8y ago
As an undergraduate in the UK whose university doesn’t have the greatest subscription collection, Sci-Hub has literally enabled me to write my dissertation as there is no way I could have afforded the individual cost of the papers I’ve needed to reference. I can only imagine what it is like in poorer parts of the world in terms of access to subscriptions, or lack thereof.
- siruncledrew 8y ago
  That's very true. The costs are enormous, and also keeps the research closed off to many non-Western universities. Based on rankings such as [1], the research performance is heavily skewed to the US and UK. To gain a greater global perspective, research needs to push outside of these bounds. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Ranking_of_Scientific_Papers_for_World_Universities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Ranking_of_Scienti...
  - kuschku 8y ago
    Be aware that those rankings are heavily biased. e.g. they don't count 95% of German research at all.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ComodoHacker 8y ago
  Let me ask you a provocative question. When you build credibility in your field, will you be reviewing papers for free for open access journals?
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    What makes you think they plan to become an academic?
  - Jedi72 8y ago
    There may be other answers to this problem. When someone posts a blog article, it usually gets submitted to an aggregator like HN and it then gets upvoted/downvoted/discussed, all for free. You might say that you need to be an expert in the field to review a paper and, perhaps that is true - or perhaps new publishing constraints will lead to a trend of more readable papers with more background and thorough explanation so as to be understandable to a wider audience. I for one am not afraid to see a little classic SV disruption hitting Academia.
    - tetrazine 8y ago
      Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed. While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsourced to non-experts in the field, as you describe (even if the paper was "readable" the domain experts would presumably be the most able to evaluate a paper). Maybe one or two reviewers on a panel of many, but otherwise it makes very little sense. All of these suggestions essentially serve to slow down the research process and have benefits for a very small portion of the potential audience. I think what is more valuable to opening academic research up is greater open education material, besides the traditional models of bachelor->masters->phd->postgrad, and more aggressively written textbooks that work on the cutting edge of the field (with appropriate disclaimers). Oh, and big disclaimer: tons of papers are badly written. That doesn't affect any of these points.
- unixhero 8y ago
  Not only in poorer countries, but for everyone, including Me, doing research before Sci-Hub !
- kingkongjaffa 8y ago
  Yeah if you go to a less than stellar university your data sources and paper sources are not that great. I went to a poorly ranked undergrad and had most of the standard stuff. I went to a top 10 for my post grad and we had so much stuff, market research reports that normally only consulting companies can afford, top data sources, virtually every journal subscription imaginable, top level subscriptions to online textbook resources. Imagine a school which pays for a license so you can download PDF's of the textbooks for free. Made a huge difference, the fact we all had access to this stuff meant the courses could teach literally from the research papers so we learned cutting edge stuff. My exams were made up of content from research papers written between 2015-2018. Practically brand new developments. Compared with the poor university which taught from the standard texts.
  - overkalix 8y ago
    I'm a PhD student and my university has a pretty decent subscription. But while downloading a paper from a uni IP is very straightforward, from outside campus one has to jump through so many hoops that sci hub is the most comfortable option.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Especially say in Eastern Europe, resources like SciHub are critical for students and researchers.
albutr 8y ago
Definitely a great resource, but (thankfully) it's almost completely redundant in a lot of fields. I'm willing to bet almost no one in my department has ever actually used it, or even heard of it, thanks to preprint servers like arXiv where almost everyone publishes their work for free on their own (usually either before or after publishing in a real journal, but some subfields have taken to exclusively publishing there). I think fields outside of physics and math have caught on recently; there's now a bioRXiv, PsyArXiv, and ChemRxiv. That last one, kind of surprisingly, is actually co-owned and run by ACS and RSC, two of the largest chemistry publishing companies (who, iirc, had some weird terms that initially made some people weary about using preprints at all when publishing in their journals). Hopefully more publishers can follow suit and support open access across more fields.
- aaron-lebo 8y ago
  This is my experience in political science as well. Poli sci is starting to get some really good repositories of data (replication is something we actually care about), but for a long time common practice has been to post your paper on your own site. Nobody is going to stop you. Ex. https://sites.google.com/site/brynrosenfeld/research https://sites.google.com/site/brynrosenfeld/research These are a number of articles in major journals which if you go through Wiley are closed access, but a quick search will bring it up. The only reason that doesn't happen is the author doesn't want to do it, which is detrimental to them because their research isn't promulgated as easily. This stuff tends to be working itself out outside of SciHub, it's just the most visible route (probably because the approach is so newsworthy, being illegal and taking on big interests).
- akvadrako 8y ago
  I don't know what field you are talking about, but in physics only about 95% of papers I want to read are published on arXiv, including older ones. I assume most researchers occasionally read something from scihub or subscription services.
  - tomrod 8y ago
    Downside to this is if there is a major revision during publication peer review that doesn't get reflected in arxiv. Economics has has SSRN for years, and while not as widely adopted I would presume the issues between the two are similar.
Iv 8y ago
Paywalls are a totally evil thing. It hinders human progress will providing benefits only to a small amount of parasites.
mtgx 8y ago
It sounds like the "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries* is made real by less copyright, not more. And yet, Congress is now trying to extend copyright to 144 years. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/us_congress_copyright_extension/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/us_congress_copyrig...
- icebraining 8y ago
  No, it's not, that Act doesn't extend copyright terms. Those works are already protected until 2067 (144 years, for some of them). The Act changes the type of protection they receive during that term, specifically meaning that streaming services will always have to pay royalties for using those songs, rather than that being decided depending on state law.
emersion 8y ago
I don't know how I would have been able to write my first paper without SciHub. My lab didn't have subscriptions, they just decided to stop paying.
votingprawn 8y ago
I was a researcher at a reasonably big UK University until about 6 months ago, and I used SciHub fairly regularly. Sometimes I used it because we didn't have the right subscription for that publisher to get me the journal I needed, but mainly I used SciHub to access papers I already had the "right" to access. The layers of logins screens, buggy single-sign-on systems, having to be in the right IP address range, not being able to download a PDF, meant that I almost always attempted to get the paper through SciHub first, and only went through the library systems when I couldn't find what I needed on SciHub.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I've read this many times. It's almost funny
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience.
  - andrepd 8y ago
    Why is it very hard? Take a look at the most successful platform for games, Steam, to see both things aren't mutually exclusive.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      There is a huge difference between Steam and Elsevier and I'm not sure why you feel the one is an example of how the other could evolve. The one sells games for entertainment purposes to the masses, the other sells subscriptions to scientific institutions to give them access to research papers. It's b2c vs b2b and a competitive space versus a captive audience.
      - kankroc 8y ago
        I think the parent comment was referring to video game piracy before Steam. It was a mess of custom launchers, DRM, losing the CD/DVD or key so people would turn to piracy to access stuff they already owned. Fast-forward a few year and most people are fine with Steam as long as it's the unified launcher for doing thing.
andrepd 8y ago
It's pure rentism. Whatever little service they provided has completely evaporated in the age of the Internet. Now they're purely feudal lords, extracting their rent from a status quo.
epmaybe 8y ago
I have access to most papers through my university, but every now and then a pubmed or google scholar search leads me to a paper I cannot access easily. For those, instead of waiting for interlibrary loan I can easily just grab the article through SciHub. Is it right? I don't know. But it makes my life so much easier when looking for something specific.
contoraria 8y ago
From my outsider perspective I mostly agree, I've read a few papers that weren't available for free. But for the opposing perspective, consider that they index curated content and don't curate anything themselves. This is a frequently debated argument. For comparison I'm considering youtube or torrent sites that are swamped with low quality content or outright malware. In effect, the inception of the internet, as far as I know, was motivated precisely by the need to exchange scientific material. But we are still far from a global library, on-line. Coordination does take a significant amount of work. So, if anything, it needs more investment. But whether that needs to be direct financial investment or just a lot of voluntary work from the people for whom the system is kind of working alright at the moment, is not even in the question. Because journals and universities acting as gate keepers setting barriers to entry is seen as elitist and pejorative by the vast majority of the excluded. That involves a lot of indirect criticism of the financial market system. The whole problem involves marketing. Just look at wikipedia, stackexchange or even the stock-exchanges to see what kind of imbalance, for lack of a better word, huge projects incur, virtually invariably.
- contoraria 8y ago
  * the vocal majority, at any rate

Kognito 8y ago

As an undergraduate in the UK whose university doesn’t have the greatest subscription collection, Sci-Hub has literally enabled me to write my dissertation as there is no way I could have afforded the individual cost of the papers I’ve needed to reference. I can only imagine what it is like in poorer parts of the world in terms of access to subscriptions, or lack thereof.

siruncledrew 8y ago
That's very true. The costs are enormous, and also keeps the research closed off to many non-Western universities. Based on rankings such as [1], the research performance is heavily skewed to the US and UK. To gain a greater global perspective, research needs to push outside of these bounds. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Ranking_of_Scientific_Papers_for_World_Universities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Ranking_of_Scienti...
- kuschku 8y ago
  Be aware that those rankings are heavily biased. e.g. they don't count 95% of German research at all.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ComodoHacker 8y ago
Let me ask you a provocative question. When you build credibility in your field, will you be reviewing papers for free for open access journals?
- umanwizard 8y ago
  What makes you think they plan to become an academic?
- Jedi72 8y ago
  There may be other answers to this problem. When someone posts a blog article, it usually gets submitted to an aggregator like HN and it then gets upvoted/downvoted/discussed, all for free. You might say that you need to be an expert in the field to review a paper and, perhaps that is true - or perhaps new publishing constraints will lead to a trend of more readable papers with more background and thorough explanation so as to be understandable to a wider audience. I for one am not afraid to see a little classic SV disruption hitting Academia.
  - tetrazine 8y ago
    Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed. While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsourced to non-experts in the field, as you describe (even if the paper was "readable" the domain experts would presumably be the most able to evaluate a paper). Maybe one or two reviewers on a panel of many, but otherwise it makes very little sense. All of these suggestions essentially serve to slow down the research process and have benefits for a very small portion of the potential audience. I think what is more valuable to opening academic research up is greater open education material, besides the traditional models of bachelor->masters->phd->postgrad, and more aggressively written textbooks that work on the cutting edge of the field (with appropriate disclaimers). Oh, and big disclaimer: tons of papers are badly written. That doesn't affect any of these points.
unixhero 8y ago
Not only in poorer countries, but for everyone, including Me, doing research before Sci-Hub !
kingkongjaffa 8y ago
Yeah if you go to a less than stellar university your data sources and paper sources are not that great. I went to a poorly ranked undergrad and had most of the standard stuff. I went to a top 10 for my post grad and we had so much stuff, market research reports that normally only consulting companies can afford, top data sources, virtually every journal subscription imaginable, top level subscriptions to online textbook resources. Imagine a school which pays for a license so you can download PDF's of the textbooks for free. Made a huge difference, the fact we all had access to this stuff meant the courses could teach literally from the research papers so we learned cutting edge stuff. My exams were made up of content from research papers written between 2015-2018. Practically brand new developments. Compared with the poor university which taught from the standard texts.
- overkalix 8y ago
  I'm a PhD student and my university has a pretty decent subscription. But while downloading a paper from a uni IP is very straightforward, from outside campus one has to jump through so many hoops that sci hub is the most comfortable option.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

Especially say in Eastern Europe, resources like SciHub are critical for students and researchers.

albutr 8y ago

Definitely a great resource, but (thankfully) it's almost completely redundant in a lot of fields. I'm willing to bet almost no one in my department has ever actually used it, or even heard of it, thanks to preprint servers like arXiv where almost everyone publishes their work for free on their own (usually either before or after publishing in a real journal, but some subfields have taken to exclusively publishing there). I think fields outside of physics and math have caught on recently; there's now a bioRXiv, PsyArXiv, and ChemRxiv. That last one, kind of surprisingly, is actually co-owned and run by ACS and RSC, two of the largest chemistry publishing companies (who, iirc, had some weird terms that initially made some people weary about using preprints at all when publishing in their journals). Hopefully more publishers can follow suit and support open access across more fields.

aaron-lebo 8y ago
This is my experience in political science as well. Poli sci is starting to get some really good repositories of data (replication is something we actually care about), but for a long time common practice has been to post your paper on your own site. Nobody is going to stop you. Ex. https://sites.google.com/site/brynrosenfeld/research https://sites.google.com/site/brynrosenfeld/research These are a number of articles in major journals which if you go through Wiley are closed access, but a quick search will bring it up. The only reason that doesn't happen is the author doesn't want to do it, which is detrimental to them because their research isn't promulgated as easily. This stuff tends to be working itself out outside of SciHub, it's just the most visible route (probably because the approach is so newsworthy, being illegal and taking on big interests).
akvadrako 8y ago
I don't know what field you are talking about, but in physics only about 95% of papers I want to read are published on arXiv, including older ones. I assume most researchers occasionally read something from scihub or subscription services.
- tomrod 8y ago
  Downside to this is if there is a major revision during publication peer review that doesn't get reflected in arxiv. Economics has has SSRN for years, and while not as widely adopted I would presume the issues between the two are similar.

Iv 8y ago

Paywalls are a totally evil thing. It hinders human progress will providing benefits only to a small amount of parasites.

mtgx 8y ago

It sounds like the "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries* is made real by less copyright, not more. And yet, Congress is now trying to extend copyright to 144 years. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/us_congress_copyright_extension/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/us_congress_copyrig...

icebraining 8y ago
No, it's not, that Act doesn't extend copyright terms. Those works are already protected until 2067 (144 years, for some of them). The Act changes the type of protection they receive during that term, specifically meaning that streaming services will always have to pay royalties for using those songs, rather than that being decided depending on state law.

emersion 8y ago

I don't know how I would have been able to write my first paper without SciHub. My lab didn't have subscriptions, they just decided to stop paying.

votingprawn 8y ago

I was a researcher at a reasonably big UK University until about 6 months ago, and I used SciHub fairly regularly. Sometimes I used it because we didn't have the right subscription for that publisher to get me the journal I needed, but mainly I used SciHub to access papers I already had the "right" to access. The layers of logins screens, buggy single-sign-on systems, having to be in the right IP address range, not being able to download a PDF, meant that I almost always attempted to get the paper through SciHub first, and only went through the library systems when I couldn't find what I needed on SciHub.

agumonkey 8y ago
I've read this many times. It's almost funny
jacquesm 8y ago
Piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience.
- andrepd 8y ago
  Why is it very hard? Take a look at the most successful platform for games, Steam, to see both things aren't mutually exclusive.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    There is a huge difference between Steam and Elsevier and I'm not sure why you feel the one is an example of how the other could evolve. The one sells games for entertainment purposes to the masses, the other sells subscriptions to scientific institutions to give them access to research papers. It's b2c vs b2b and a competitive space versus a captive audience.
    - kankroc 8y ago
      I think the parent comment was referring to video game piracy before Steam. It was a mess of custom launchers, DRM, losing the CD/DVD or key so people would turn to piracy to access stuff they already owned. Fast-forward a few year and most people are fine with Steam as long as it's the unified launcher for doing thing.

andrepd 8y ago

It's pure rentism. Whatever little service they provided has completely evaporated in the age of the Internet. Now they're purely feudal lords, extracting their rent from a status quo.

epmaybe 8y ago

I have access to most papers through my university, but every now and then a pubmed or google scholar search leads me to a paper I cannot access easily. For those, instead of waiting for interlibrary loan I can easily just grab the article through SciHub. Is it right? I don't know. But it makes my life so much easier when looking for something specific.

contoraria 8y ago

From my outsider perspective I mostly agree, I've read a few papers that weren't available for free. But for the opposing perspective, consider that they index curated content and don't curate anything themselves. This is a frequently debated argument. For comparison I'm considering youtube or torrent sites that are swamped with low quality content or outright malware. In effect, the inception of the internet, as far as I know, was motivated precisely by the need to exchange scientific material. But we are still far from a global library, on-line. Coordination does take a significant amount of work. So, if anything, it needs more investment. But whether that needs to be direct financial investment or just a lot of voluntary work from the people for whom the system is kind of working alright at the moment, is not even in the question. Because journals and universities acting as gate keepers setting barriers to entry is seen as elitist and pejorative by the vast majority of the excluded. That involves a lot of indirect criticism of the financial market system. The whole problem involves marketing. Just look at wikipedia, stackexchange or even the stock-exchanges to see what kind of imbalance, for lack of a better word, huge projects incur, virtually invariably.

contoraria 8y ago
* the vocal majority, at any rate