7 ms·

> Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years "Yeah our researchers don't mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion

> Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years "Yeah our researchers don't mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion over. Not only do universities not openly admit to SciHub usage, but there are even university administrations that still warn their students and staff against using SciHub. I recently read through a fairly prominent European university’s freshly-revised course for undergraduates on how basic use of the library and research methods (I saw this as part of my job, so naturally I won’t name the institution). Among the course content on how to find journal articles in JSTOR and Web of Science, how to properly cite your sources, etc. were admonitions not to use SciHub because it “is illegal”, and warnings that use of SciHub can lead to failing a course or having one’s student status revoked.

Baeocystin 8y ago
Parallel construction it is, then.
- mjevans 8y ago
  Cite the official published source.
  - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    I wonder how this dichotomy of "use Wikipedia and SciHub, but you don't cite them directly" affects the ethics of graduates.
    - smt88 8y ago
      Citing Wikipedia directly is silly when Wikipedia often has its own citation of a primary source that you can use instead. Wikipedia is explicitly not a primary source by design. SciHub is different because it replicates primary sources. I'd argue that it's unethical to keep publicly funded science behind a paywall, so perhaps the ethical question you're implying is more nuanced than that of simple "piracy".
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      People cite Wikipedia all the time in peer-reviewed journal papers. Many e.g. high school teachers recommend that their students not cite (any) encyclopedias directly, because they want the students to learn how to read and cite primary sources. Reading a secondary source for an overview then diving into primary sources is a perfectly fine and ethical way to do research. I can’t see how schools and teachers advising students to read secondary sources for context but then follow their references to primary sources to read for the details would cause any kind of ethical compromise. There is no reason to cite SciHub (just like there is no reason to cite Academia.edu, ResearchGate, some professor’s personal webpage with a hosted preprint, Google Scholar, etc.) whether or not someone uses it.
    - tnecniv 8y ago
      Sci-Hub isn't a thing that you cite. It gives you a publication from a conference / journal. That's what you cite. Citing Sci-Hub would be like citing google.
    - geofft 8y ago
      I think you have a point and a lot of replies are missing it. Tacit acceptance of Sci-Hub is tacit acceptance that some laws don't matter and everyone knows it. That's certainly an ethical stance with implications. It's not necessarily a bad stance (D&D would call it "chaotic good") and it is I think my own stance, but once you decide that laws are secondary to your personal and professional needs if you don't get caught, you're likely to use the same argument in other respects. Citing the original paper instead of the Sci-Hub URL only increases the extent to which you're pretending to follow the law. Wikipedia has primary sources linked, yes, but it has its own biases. It tries not to, but it still has them to some extent, perhaps just in terms of what sections have been written and what haven't based on editors' interests. If you use Wikipedia to find primary sources, you're filtering your research through those biases. That has direct implications, and indirect implications for ethics in that you've decided this filtering is acceptable to you and also that it's acceptable (and perhaps required) not to acknowledge it. (And yes, of course there are other biases in terms of what university libraries stock, what previous academics have written about, what funding agencies are interested in, etc. I'd say that how much you pay attention to these potential biases and whether you see them as significant is also a question of ethics.)
      - darkpuma 8y ago
        How many grad students for generations have been smoking dope despite the laws against it? Using sci-hub despite the law is not a significant departure from the status quo of grad students ignoring dumb laws when it suits them. Sci-hub does not present a uniquely deleterious effect on the ethics of grad students. Also, even if sci-hub were legal, you still wouldn't cite the sci-hub url. That's not how things are cited.
      - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
        > once you decide that laws are secondary to your personal and professional needs if you don't get caught, you're likely to use the same argument in other respect I don't think it's that clear cut. If you drive above the speed limit, or smoke weed in a state where it's not allowed, or pirate some DVDs, you're not automatically going to progress to more serious crimes. People seem to be perfectly capable of "ahh let's ignore this stupid law" and not start sliding down some slippery slope.
    - jplayer01 8y ago
      Nobody needs to cite scihub. Download the papers you need off of it, cite them.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Citations should always be in some standard form, including author, year, paper title, journal. But for a web link, just put the DOI. A reader can either click it or paste it into scihub, as they prefer.
xorand 8y ago
There is a lot of money going from universities to publishers, be them traditional or Gold OA. Researchers would rather use either Green OA (like arXiv) or Sci-Hub or articles available on other researchers pages. Is therefore interesting that a big university makes this move, with the argument: "the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription"
shittyadmin 8y ago
Yeah it's very much a don't ask, don't tell sort of thing. Check out some of the location images for scihub users and they very much paint a different story.
genidoi 8y ago
From that information, I would actively want to check SciHub out if I had never heard of it. Academia + notoriety sounds novel and useful. Part of why SciHub has succeeded is just how easy it is. Copy/pasting an arbitrary DOI from any source will always beat most journals arcane login systems (especially on mobile) and their divine mission of obscuring "Download PDF" buttons.
- cinquemb 8y ago
  SciHub is amazing. I'm not in academia or industry, and I was working on trying to find some eutectics of simple ionic halide mixtures with some software that was missing some of the activation energy coefficients for some of the ion interactions. Must have looked at at least 30+ papers, which if university-publishing house cartel have their way, would have cost me thousands of dollars just to look at. Between sci-hub and all the open source code from labs and individuals around the world, it's just breathtaking what can be explored now outside the confines of academia.
  - selimthegrim 8y ago
    Curious what the application was?
    - cinquemb 8y ago
      Mostly exploring molten salt mixtures for thermal energy storage with a larger working temperature range and a reasonable melting point compared to what's used typically.
      - lawrenceyan 8y ago
        Do you work at a molten salt energy storage company? What's the industry landscape there like? Like still primarily R&D, or is it mostly about production now.
        cinquemb 8y ago
darkpuma 8y ago
Warning people not to use sci-hub, mentioning it by name as something that you shouldn't use, is a plausibly deniable way to spread the word about it.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  Oh, I can assure you that this particular university is dead serious about SciHub use being undesirable. The course I mentioned dedicates significant space to respecting copyright, not only as something expected of researchers, but as a moral duty. Also, inter-library loan is a source of income for the university library, that is, if the library does not have access to a particular journal in the databases it subscribes to, then it will obtain the journal article from elsewhere but at a hefty fee, so perhaps this is another reason they would prefer students avoid SciHub.
  - dj-wonk 8y ago
    Enlightened morality often means being mindful of tradeoffs. Not doing an exhaustive search of academic literature because it is prohibitively expensive or time-consuming is a clear negative -- doing so may result in lower-quality research. I personally see many good reasons to distinguish general intellectual property theft from using SciHub for academic research.
  - jumelles 8y ago
    Which university is this? If anything involving copyright is "moral," it's breaking it.
    - ascar 8y ago
      Who defines "moral"? I can't see that breaking any law is the moral thing to do as the law is the moral code that society agreed to give it self (at least in a democracy). By your logic it might become moral to murder, because it benefits you and maybe many others more than the one murdered. Following the law is always a moral obligation and personally deciding which rules should be followed and which shouldn't is a dangerous space. Especially from a biased and self-centered world view, which we all have as individuals.
znelis 8y ago
On the other hand I have seen a guide from a Swedish university library with a "the dark side" section recommending Scihub, #icanhazpdf and /r/scholar. The contract between Elsevier and pretty much all Swedish universities was canceled a year ago and they seem to be fine.
jtmcmc 8y ago
a nods as good as a wink ;)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jplayer01 8y ago
Oh please. Everybody I know personally and everybody I know of through these people use scihub. It's such an incredibly useful tool that it's now ubiquitous throughout academia. Of course universities aren't 'officially' advising its use, but informally, it's pretty much accepted.

Baeocystin 8y ago

Parallel construction it is, then.

mjevans 8y ago
Cite the official published source.
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  I wonder how this dichotomy of "use Wikipedia and SciHub, but you don't cite them directly" affects the ethics of graduates.
  - smt88 8y ago
    Citing Wikipedia directly is silly when Wikipedia often has its own citation of a primary source that you can use instead. Wikipedia is explicitly not a primary source by design. SciHub is different because it replicates primary sources. I'd argue that it's unethical to keep publicly funded science behind a paywall, so perhaps the ethical question you're implying is more nuanced than that of simple "piracy".
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    People cite Wikipedia all the time in peer-reviewed journal papers. Many e.g. high school teachers recommend that their students not cite (any) encyclopedias directly, because they want the students to learn how to read and cite primary sources. Reading a secondary source for an overview then diving into primary sources is a perfectly fine and ethical way to do research. I can’t see how schools and teachers advising students to read secondary sources for context but then follow their references to primary sources to read for the details would cause any kind of ethical compromise. There is no reason to cite SciHub (just like there is no reason to cite Academia.edu, ResearchGate, some professor’s personal webpage with a hosted preprint, Google Scholar, etc.) whether or not someone uses it.
  - tnecniv 8y ago
    Sci-Hub isn't a thing that you cite. It gives you a publication from a conference / journal. That's what you cite. Citing Sci-Hub would be like citing google.
  - geofft 8y ago
    I think you have a point and a lot of replies are missing it. Tacit acceptance of Sci-Hub is tacit acceptance that some laws don't matter and everyone knows it. That's certainly an ethical stance with implications. It's not necessarily a bad stance (D&D would call it "chaotic good") and it is I think my own stance, but once you decide that laws are secondary to your personal and professional needs if you don't get caught, you're likely to use the same argument in other respects. Citing the original paper instead of the Sci-Hub URL only increases the extent to which you're pretending to follow the law. Wikipedia has primary sources linked, yes, but it has its own biases. It tries not to, but it still has them to some extent, perhaps just in terms of what sections have been written and what haven't based on editors' interests. If you use Wikipedia to find primary sources, you're filtering your research through those biases. That has direct implications, and indirect implications for ethics in that you've decided this filtering is acceptable to you and also that it's acceptable (and perhaps required) not to acknowledge it. (And yes, of course there are other biases in terms of what university libraries stock, what previous academics have written about, what funding agencies are interested in, etc. I'd say that how much you pay attention to these potential biases and whether you see them as significant is also a question of ethics.)
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      How many grad students for generations have been smoking dope despite the laws against it? Using sci-hub despite the law is not a significant departure from the status quo of grad students ignoring dumb laws when it suits them. Sci-hub does not present a uniquely deleterious effect on the ethics of grad students. Also, even if sci-hub were legal, you still wouldn't cite the sci-hub url. That's not how things are cited.
    - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
      > once you decide that laws are secondary to your personal and professional needs if you don't get caught, you're likely to use the same argument in other respect I don't think it's that clear cut. If you drive above the speed limit, or smoke weed in a state where it's not allowed, or pirate some DVDs, you're not automatically going to progress to more serious crimes. People seem to be perfectly capable of "ahh let's ignore this stupid law" and not start sliding down some slippery slope.
  - jplayer01 8y ago
    Nobody needs to cite scihub. Download the papers you need off of it, cite them.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Citations should always be in some standard form, including author, year, paper title, journal. But for a web link, just put the DOI. A reader can either click it or paste it into scihub, as they prefer.

xorand 8y ago

There is a lot of money going from universities to publishers, be them traditional or Gold OA. Researchers would rather use either Green OA (like arXiv) or Sci-Hub or articles available on other researchers pages. Is therefore interesting that a big university makes this move, with the argument: "the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription"

shittyadmin 8y ago

Yeah it's very much a don't ask, don't tell sort of thing. Check out some of the location images for scihub users and they very much paint a different story.

genidoi 8y ago

From that information, I would actively want to check SciHub out if I had never heard of it. Academia + notoriety sounds novel and useful. Part of why SciHub has succeeded is just how easy it is. Copy/pasting an arbitrary DOI from any source will always beat most journals arcane login systems (especially on mobile) and their divine mission of obscuring "Download PDF" buttons.

cinquemb 8y ago
SciHub is amazing. I'm not in academia or industry, and I was working on trying to find some eutectics of simple ionic halide mixtures with some software that was missing some of the activation energy coefficients for some of the ion interactions. Must have looked at at least 30+ papers, which if university-publishing house cartel have their way, would have cost me thousands of dollars just to look at. Between sci-hub and all the open source code from labs and individuals around the world, it's just breathtaking what can be explored now outside the confines of academia.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  Curious what the application was?
  - cinquemb 8y ago
    Mostly exploring molten salt mixtures for thermal energy storage with a larger working temperature range and a reasonable melting point compared to what's used typically.
    - lawrenceyan 8y ago
      Do you work at a molten salt energy storage company? What's the industry landscape there like? Like still primarily R&D, or is it mostly about production now.
      - cinquemb 8y ago

darkpuma 8y ago

Warning people not to use sci-hub, mentioning it by name as something that you shouldn't use, is a plausibly deniable way to spread the word about it.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
Oh, I can assure you that this particular university is dead serious about SciHub use being undesirable. The course I mentioned dedicates significant space to respecting copyright, not only as something expected of researchers, but as a moral duty. Also, inter-library loan is a source of income for the university library, that is, if the library does not have access to a particular journal in the databases it subscribes to, then it will obtain the journal article from elsewhere but at a hefty fee, so perhaps this is another reason they would prefer students avoid SciHub.
- dj-wonk 8y ago
  Enlightened morality often means being mindful of tradeoffs. Not doing an exhaustive search of academic literature because it is prohibitively expensive or time-consuming is a clear negative -- doing so may result in lower-quality research. I personally see many good reasons to distinguish general intellectual property theft from using SciHub for academic research.
- jumelles 8y ago
  Which university is this? If anything involving copyright is "moral," it's breaking it.
  - ascar 8y ago
    Who defines "moral"? I can't see that breaking any law is the moral thing to do as the law is the moral code that society agreed to give it self (at least in a democracy). By your logic it might become moral to murder, because it benefits you and maybe many others more than the one murdered. Following the law is always a moral obligation and personally deciding which rules should be followed and which shouldn't is a dangerous space. Especially from a biased and self-centered world view, which we all have as individuals.

znelis 8y ago

On the other hand I have seen a guide from a Swedish university library with a "the dark side" section recommending Scihub, #icanhazpdf and /r/scholar. The contract between Elsevier and pretty much all Swedish universities was canceled a year ago and they seem to be fine.

jtmcmc 8y ago

a nods as good as a wink ;)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jplayer01 8y ago

Oh please. Everybody I know personally and everybody I know of through these people use scihub. It's such an incredibly useful tool that it's now ubiquitous throughout academia. Of course universities aren't 'officially' advising its use, but informally, it's pretty much accepted.