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The way to think about this is an article in Nature is like winning a tiny Nobel prize, with no prize money. You can make whatever other sensible publication ou

The way to think about this is an article in Nature is like winning a tiny Nobel prize, with no prize money. You can make whatever other sensible publication outlet you like, but it's hard to create something that has the prestige of winning a tiny Nobel prize. That's Nature's value proposition. Brand, history and exclusivity. This is why you can't get too angry at the scientists who continue to publish in it. If you kill yourself to figure something out worthy of a tiny Nobel prize, are you really not going to claim it? It's not like claiming that tiny Nobel prize is gonna hurt the dissemination of your work. The higher profile of your work will easily compensate for the fact people have to jump through a hoop to read it. This is why I love sci-hub. It just destroys the hoop. It doesn't need to figure out how to replace the brand, history and exclusivity of publications like Nature. Along with government-mandated open source laws, it's one of the only realistic ways to actually disrupt this industry.

Vinnl 8y ago
I don't think Sci-Hub breaks the loop. Researchers still need to publish with the mini Nobel prizes to advance their career in a highly competitive field, and governments/funders still don't want to dictate where researchers get to publish their work, so in effect, what happens is that governments mandate Open Access and pay the same old publishers significant (and disproportionate) amounts of money to make the single articles they fund openly available. In other words, the costs of research still don't go down, and the government-mandates were happening without Sci-Hub as well...
- Tomminn 8y ago
  At the university I'm at, every time the library dropped its subscription to a particular journal there used to be a strong backlash from academics at the university. Since sci-hub, the library has been able to drop a bunch of journals and for some mysterious reason none of the academics seem to give as much of a shit anymore. Obviously, no-one has no idea why..

Vinnl 8y ago

I don't think Sci-Hub breaks the loop. Researchers still need to publish with the mini Nobel prizes to advance their career in a highly competitive field, and governments/funders still don't want to dictate where researchers get to publish their work, so in effect, what happens is that governments mandate Open Access and pay the same old publishers significant (and disproportionate) amounts of money to make the single articles they fund openly available. In other words, the costs of research still don't go down, and the government-mandates were happening without Sci-Hub as well...

Tomminn 8y ago
At the university I'm at, every time the library dropped its subscription to a particular journal there used to be a strong backlash from academics at the university. Since sci-hub, the library has been able to drop a bunch of journals and for some mysterious reason none of the academics seem to give as much of a shit anymore. Obviously, no-one has no idea why..