3 ms·

Making a good search facilities like Sci-Hub or even steps further is also very important. Not only paywalling is a problem - even if you have a subscription nu

by xvilka 8y ago

Making a good search facilities like Sci-Hub or even steps further is also very important. Not only paywalling is a problem - even if you have a subscription number of clicks to reach the article is usually more than one, not to speak about awful, unintuitive interfaces depending on publisher/journal.

Vinnl 8y ago
For Open Access articles, Unpaywall [1] (or at least its API) usually can find a direct link to the PDF (or HTML if available). For example, this is what I use in Flockademic [2] to be able to directly link to the articles themselves for researchers that have added the DOIs of the Open Access articles to their ORCID iDs. Point being, if articles can be freely distributed, that paves the way for discovery services to provide better interfaces to the research. [1] https://unpaywall.org https://unpaywall.org [2] https://flockademic.com https://flockademic.com
Bartweiss 8y ago
It's striking how many academics admit (usually anonymously, online) to using Sci-Hub for content they do have legitimate access to. Sci-Hub appears to be pretty much flawless at looking up articles across all publishers by ID or even title, and quickly returning the right thing if it's available. The systems provided by publishers are, um, not. They're at the usual quality of bad corporate software, but more strikingly their anti-piracy changes have only served to make the gap worse. There are anti-crawler features which freeze access to entire universities when a hidden link is followed. There are view-in-app and download-disabled restrictions, often associated with no-searchable-text. (Which are especially idiotic, of course, because you can't actually restrict access to static content once you serve it. Using screenshots and OCR is irritating, but not hard to apply.) And in the worst cases, there's "available on request" via a library or some other human-interaction delivery mechanism. Which actually would limit bulk piracy, but only by crippling access altogether. Every time I've tried to get a background in a topic or write about it, there's been a step where I check a dozen papers and discard 80% of them as being irrelevant for my purpose (or simply bad). Assuming that's common, it's hard to imagine how silos with custom access mechanisms can endure against a single, searchable repository at any price.
- cultus 8y ago
  >It's striking how many academics admit (usually anonymously, online) to using Sci-Hub for content they do have legitimate access to. Sci-Hub appears to be pretty much flawless at looking up articles across all publishers by ID or even title, and quickly returning the right thing if it's available. It's funny how absolutely useless Google scholar is for finding papers. You can specifically put in authors and the exact title in quotes and it will still be on like the third page.

by xvilka 8y ago

Vinnl 8y ago

For Open Access articles, Unpaywall [1] (or at least its API) usually can find a direct link to the PDF (or HTML if available). For example, this is what I use in Flockademic [2] to be able to directly link to the articles themselves for researchers that have added the DOIs of the Open Access articles to their ORCID iDs. Point being, if articles can be freely distributed, that paves the way for discovery services to provide better interfaces to the research. [1] https://unpaywall.org https://unpaywall.org [2] https://flockademic.com https://flockademic.com

Bartweiss 8y ago

It's striking how many academics admit (usually anonymously, online) to using Sci-Hub for content they do have legitimate access to. Sci-Hub appears to be pretty much flawless at looking up articles across all publishers by ID or even title, and quickly returning the right thing if it's available. The systems provided by publishers are, um, not. They're at the usual quality of bad corporate software, but more strikingly their anti-piracy changes have only served to make the gap worse. There are anti-crawler features which freeze access to entire universities when a hidden link is followed. There are view-in-app and download-disabled restrictions, often associated with no-searchable-text. (Which are especially idiotic, of course, because you can't actually restrict access to static content once you serve it. Using screenshots and OCR is irritating, but not hard to apply.) And in the worst cases, there's "available on request" via a library or some other human-interaction delivery mechanism. Which actually would limit bulk piracy, but only by crippling access altogether. Every time I've tried to get a background in a topic or write about it, there's been a step where I check a dozen papers and discard 80% of them as being irrelevant for my purpose (or simply bad). Assuming that's common, it's hard to imagine how silos with custom access mechanisms can endure against a single, searchable repository at any price.

cultus 8y ago
>It's striking how many academics admit (usually anonymously, online) to using Sci-Hub for content they do have legitimate access to. Sci-Hub appears to be pretty much flawless at looking up articles across all publishers by ID or even title, and quickly returning the right thing if it's available. It's funny how absolutely useless Google scholar is for finding papers. You can specifically put in authors and the exact title in quotes and it will still be on like the third page.