8 ms·

ScienceLeaks

71 points by kilian 16y ago

ajays 16y ago
The intention is noble, but the implementation is horribly broken. I agree with Rosie that the current system of paywalls is horribly broken. (I spent 10 years in academia, so I have some idea about the system). The example cited (the "arsenic life" paper) happens all the time: you hear about some exciting new discovery, only to find that the paper is locked behind a paywall. This is NOT how it should be! With the Internet, there is no reason for most (any?) of these pay journals to exist in their current form. The research is typically funded by the government (like the NASA "arsenic life" research), so why should its findings be closed? We (in the CS/EE field) should be taking the lead here and getting rid of ACM and IEEE journals. After many years as a member, I cancelled my ACM and IEEE memberships because it was clear that these organizations existed solely to support themselves. There are some courageous authors out there who will put up copies of their papers for public access. I even know of one author who put up a PDF of a book that he published. We need more such authors!
Bud 16y ago
How is this site planning to stay in existence for longer than about an hour after it costs some organization a significant amount of money? Does Blogger just ignore takedown requests?
- hugh3 16y ago
  It isn't, but if you read down it's described as a stop-gap solution. If people are actually using it by the time it gets taken down then it will get resurrected elsewhere. Here's my question: suppose I, as a kind-hearted university-based individual who respects the needs of the journals to make money but is also interested in making sure that the general public can read important scientific research, decide to upload some papers to this site. How can I be sure that it'll never be traced back to me?
  - stevenbedrick 16y ago
    You don't. Many journals' PDF-downloading systems embed metadata as well as visible watermarks containing your institution and often a timestamp and an IP address (of course, if your institution uses EZProxy, the IP address might not be immediately trackable back to you).
  - pornel 16y ago
    Make sure documents you're uploading don't contain any of your personal metadata. Ensure that you're not the only person who owns the copy you're uploading (it could be watermarked or be a unique revision of the document). Upload via TOR or similar.
    - Bud 16y ago
      The second requirement seems like it will be especially difficult to fulfill, especially if the document in question is legitimately available only from a journal. Most users will not be able to reliably spot any and all kinds of watermarks or embedded invisible metadata.
  - wvoq 16y ago
    I am curious about your understanding of "the needs of the journals to make money". As I understand it, the purpose of an academic journal is to communicate new research. For about 300 years, a published print journal was about the most reasonable method of accomplishing this. Printing and shipping cost money, so a subscription model was a natural means of recuperating costs. Historically, academic journals were non-profit enterprises, and stipends were rare for the academic work involved, viz: writing, refereeing, editing, &c. Since a non-profit journal loses money on each print copy it has to produce, why shouldn't they reduce physical circulation by converting to an open-access model? The only people who stand to lose from a norm of open access are the for-profit publishing houses. Their influence on academic publishing, on the whole, has not exactly been encouraging so far. If we can find a more efficient way to communicate research (perhaps some kind of global network of computers might do the trick?), then we should do that. We ought take no more consideration of the needs of the journals than we should for the needs of the buggy-whip makers.
pornel 16y ago
Isn't this copyright violation? It might be difficult to defend publication of entire papers as freedom of speech. Also it's hosted on Google Blogger which will respond to DMCA complaints and enforce their TOS ("Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service"), so it won't last long anyway. It should be ScienceTorrents.
- mahmud 16y ago
  Isn't this copyright violation? Who gives a crap? there are plenty of laws on the books that you should be honored to violate. Rip. Rar. Host. Upload. Seed. Knowledge wants to be free.
- dmix 16y ago
  If you're going to do something like this at least put some effort into not getting shutdown. Buy your own domain with private whois, servers in europe, etc.
Alex3917 16y ago
For what it's worth, reddit.com/r/scholar is a much better resource for exactly the same purpose.
- Geee 16y ago
  Also if somebody isn't aware, Google Scholar finds all sources of articles and there's usually a PDF available somewhere.
  - djacobs 16y ago
    Mm... I'm not sure about that. Google Scholar is a good resource, that's true. But there are hundreds of papers I've looked for that are simply not accessible without proper access. That said, I don't support this site.
    - btmorex 16y ago
      Are you clicking through the "All x versions" link? There are often pdf versions that are mistakenly out in the open (i.e. on some random university web server).
    - Geee 16y ago
      Well, I have used Scholar pretty extensively and I'd say that most papers are available somewhere without db access when clicking on the 'view all'. I think it depends on the research field though, I've been using it mostly for CS and EE related papers.
aedocw 16y ago
On the topic of journals, and what gets published, "Wrong" by David H. Freedman should be required reading. Fascinating book, he documents how hard it is for researches to get negative results published (i.e. 10 studies on a new drug, 9 studies show it does nothing, 1 study finds there might be something positive - only the positive study will be accepted.)
- jls11 16y ago
  Huge problem. It affects more than just medicine. Negative results are not collected or disseminated in many fields. They never show the "messy kitchen." Succinct lists of failed paths would be more useful than a lot of positive results that get published.
elvirs 16y ago
Most of the university students have to almost all scientific documents thanks to the library subscriptions of their universities. It will be really easy to fill the website with thousands of papers but is it worth it? is it right to do so? If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries and get access to any paper you need without violating copyright.
- wvoq 16y ago
  A data point: I have actually tried this. As a student at No Name State, I often found myself travelling to nearby Prestigious Research University for books and journals which weren't in circulation at NNS. PRU only had reciprocity agreements with other PRUs, so I couldn't ILL materials or check them out in person with my NNS card. Indeed, without a PRU ID I couldn't even enter the library except at certain designated hours, for reasons that had no discernible relation to crowding or public safety. PRU did offer a private membership, but its annual circulation fee was in the hundreds of dollars. It was 2008, and one of the richest universities in the country wanted to charge a student--who was already enrolled in NNS down the street, hardly any kind of flight risk--the equivalent of 20 hours of labor for the privilege of reading books. Now PRU has one of the worst academic cultures I've ever experienced or heard of, and I would be glad to learn that the state of public access to academic libraries is not so dire in general. It remains, though, that it is not always so trivially easy to do academic work at university libraries, even if you're already in "the academy".
  - bigfudge 16y ago
    I'm curious, why not name names? Are PRU's librarians that evil?
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries Warning: Pet peeve alert. Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some kind of alternative religion in which the priests stand in front of documentary cameras wearing white coats and handing down dogma. Then these scientists turn around and publish most of their actual writing and almost one hundred percent of their data, data-driven reasoning, and detailed experimental design in journals which are prohibitively expensive to read unless you're currently affiliated with a university. Which is, in turn, exorbitantly expensive, either in cash or in opportunity cost. Trying to understand science without reading the primary literature is like trying to understand jazz by reading the New York Times and watching the occasional Ken Burns documentary. Reviewers do write a lot about jazz, and they go on an on about how important and highbrow it all is, but if you haven't actually listened to a jazz piece for more than two minutes you're never going to get the point. Jazz is about the music. Science is about the detailed methods and the data and the literature.
dxjones 16y ago
Prediction: ScienceLeaks will be taken down within 1 week. The only reason it wouldn't be shut down is if nobody uses it. The copyright holders for academic journals have a huge financial incentive to crush ScienceLeaks. The law is on their side, right? ... and why would Google Blogger defend ScienceLeaks? They prefer people to use Google Scholar instead.
roadnottaken 16y ago
This is plain-old piracy and I'm a little surprised to see it getting up-voted on HN. There are plenty of open-access journals, but most scientists choose to publish in closed journals instead for a variety of reasons. I think the results of research funded by taxpayers should be free and, indeed, that is now required by the NIH and there's a huge resource available here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ However some of the research published in traditional journals is funded from elsewhere and, as such, I can't think of any reason why we "deserve" free access to it.
- forkandwait 16y ago
  For the most part, scientists publish in the highest prestige journal possible, because that counts the most toward tenure/ pay raises/ grant application chances; the most prestigous journals are -- for historical reasons -- still closed since they are profit centers for big for-profit publishing houses like Wiley. On the other hand, all the scientists I know wish they could give their papers away for free because it builds their reputation to have people use and cite them, even undergrads at state colleges that can't afford the bigger database subscriptions. Except for textbooks, scholars almost never make royalties, so the profit incentive isn't what you might think. A scholar makes more money by getting raises from the university, speaking and consulting fees, and publishing undergrad textbooks (sometimes). All of these are increased if their is a wider dissemination of their work. Finally, .... in the US, almost all research is funded by taxpayers, directly or indirectly, it's just NIH funded stuff that must be free. Finally, finally .... if it weren't for the fact that the prestigious journals are a ticket to tenure and promotion, there would be no reason to publish anywhere except for Arxiv: so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system...
  - roadnottaken 16y ago
    "so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system..." To misquote Churchill: Peer review is the worst system for scientific publishing... except for all the others.
    - 16y ago
dnautics 16y ago
I wanted to start a 'scienceleaks' site that was actually a site that facilitated the whistleblowing on scientific fraud. A small raffle for a cash prize can be a huge incentive for underpaid grad students.
- natnat 16y ago
  I don't think a financial incentive for leakers would be a good thing. Wikileaks works fine without offering anyone money.
eplanit 16y ago
The new Misguided Morality: Theft = Liberation.
- flipbrad 16y ago
  unless, of course, it plays a useful role. an ecosystem can thrive with both predator and prey - even with paratism. Point here, expressed more eloquently above, is that free and unrestricted knowledge can be a tremendously beneficial thing to society. You lock it up for good cause. Do Nature et al provide a useful service, the value of which is commensurate to the fees they charge? I'd argue that they don't: the fees they charge for access are because they have the best papers. One does not submit to Nature on strength of service, but on strength of the goodwill attached to the Nature brand, nurtured mostly through exclusivity. Besides some possible but implausible effect as an effective signal-to-noise filter (which I would argue it isn't, given that it is so exclusive, being largely faithful to a print format which has limited capacity), that's not a very good reason to prevent those with curiosity about the world - but who don't have $32 per article they want to read. Piracy of this sort, if it could be kept to those that would not otherwise purchase this article at any profitable price point for the journal, could actually be economically/education-optimal, perhaps? Also, the last time I checked, copyright had exceptions for academic use. Although I think these are usually limited to copying/reproduction, not the right of publication/distribution, I find these to be distinctions that just aren't warranted in the digital era.
zzzeek 16y ago
DMCA in 3..2...1...

71 points by kilian 16y ago

ajays 16y ago

The intention is noble, but the implementation is horribly broken. I agree with Rosie that the current system of paywalls is horribly broken. (I spent 10 years in academia, so I have some idea about the system). The example cited (the "arsenic life" paper) happens all the time: you hear about some exciting new discovery, only to find that the paper is locked behind a paywall. This is NOT how it should be! With the Internet, there is no reason for most (any?) of these pay journals to exist in their current form. The research is typically funded by the government (like the NASA "arsenic life" research), so why should its findings be closed? We (in the CS/EE field) should be taking the lead here and getting rid of ACM and IEEE journals. After many years as a member, I cancelled my ACM and IEEE memberships because it was clear that these organizations existed solely to support themselves. There are some courageous authors out there who will put up copies of their papers for public access. I even know of one author who put up a PDF of a book that he published. We need more such authors!

Bud 16y ago

How is this site planning to stay in existence for longer than about an hour after it costs some organization a significant amount of money? Does Blogger just ignore takedown requests?

hugh3 16y ago
It isn't, but if you read down it's described as a stop-gap solution. If people are actually using it by the time it gets taken down then it will get resurrected elsewhere. Here's my question: suppose I, as a kind-hearted university-based individual who respects the needs of the journals to make money but is also interested in making sure that the general public can read important scientific research, decide to upload some papers to this site. How can I be sure that it'll never be traced back to me?
- stevenbedrick 16y ago
  You don't. Many journals' PDF-downloading systems embed metadata as well as visible watermarks containing your institution and often a timestamp and an IP address (of course, if your institution uses EZProxy, the IP address might not be immediately trackable back to you).
- pornel 16y ago
  Make sure documents you're uploading don't contain any of your personal metadata. Ensure that you're not the only person who owns the copy you're uploading (it could be watermarked or be a unique revision of the document). Upload via TOR or similar.
  - Bud 16y ago
    The second requirement seems like it will be especially difficult to fulfill, especially if the document in question is legitimately available only from a journal. Most users will not be able to reliably spot any and all kinds of watermarks or embedded invisible metadata.
- wvoq 16y ago
  I am curious about your understanding of "the needs of the journals to make money". As I understand it, the purpose of an academic journal is to communicate new research. For about 300 years, a published print journal was about the most reasonable method of accomplishing this. Printing and shipping cost money, so a subscription model was a natural means of recuperating costs. Historically, academic journals were non-profit enterprises, and stipends were rare for the academic work involved, viz: writing, refereeing, editing, &c. Since a non-profit journal loses money on each print copy it has to produce, why shouldn't they reduce physical circulation by converting to an open-access model? The only people who stand to lose from a norm of open access are the for-profit publishing houses. Their influence on academic publishing, on the whole, has not exactly been encouraging so far. If we can find a more efficient way to communicate research (perhaps some kind of global network of computers might do the trick?), then we should do that. We ought take no more consideration of the needs of the journals than we should for the needs of the buggy-whip makers.

pornel 16y ago

Isn't this copyright violation? It might be difficult to defend publication of entire papers as freedom of speech. Also it's hosted on Google Blogger which will respond to DMCA complaints and enforce their TOS ("Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service"), so it won't last long anyway. It should be ScienceTorrents.

mahmud 16y ago
Isn't this copyright violation? Who gives a crap? there are plenty of laws on the books that you should be honored to violate. Rip. Rar. Host. Upload. Seed. Knowledge wants to be free.
dmix 16y ago
If you're going to do something like this at least put some effort into not getting shutdown. Buy your own domain with private whois, servers in europe, etc.

Alex3917 16y ago

For what it's worth, reddit.com/r/scholar is a much better resource for exactly the same purpose.

Geee 16y ago
Also if somebody isn't aware, Google Scholar finds all sources of articles and there's usually a PDF available somewhere.
- djacobs 16y ago
  Mm... I'm not sure about that. Google Scholar is a good resource, that's true. But there are hundreds of papers I've looked for that are simply not accessible without proper access. That said, I don't support this site.
  - btmorex 16y ago
    Are you clicking through the "All x versions" link? There are often pdf versions that are mistakenly out in the open (i.e. on some random university web server).
  - Geee 16y ago
    Well, I have used Scholar pretty extensively and I'd say that most papers are available somewhere without db access when clicking on the 'view all'. I think it depends on the research field though, I've been using it mostly for CS and EE related papers.

aedocw 16y ago

On the topic of journals, and what gets published, "Wrong" by David H. Freedman should be required reading. Fascinating book, he documents how hard it is for researches to get negative results published (i.e. 10 studies on a new drug, 9 studies show it does nothing, 1 study finds there might be something positive - only the positive study will be accepted.)

jls11 16y ago
Huge problem. It affects more than just medicine. Negative results are not collected or disseminated in many fields. They never show the "messy kitchen." Succinct lists of failed paths would be more useful than a lot of positive results that get published.

elvirs 16y ago

Most of the university students have to almost all scientific documents thanks to the library subscriptions of their universities. It will be really easy to fill the website with thousands of papers but is it worth it? is it right to do so? If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries and get access to any paper you need without violating copyright.

wvoq 16y ago
A data point: I have actually tried this. As a student at No Name State, I often found myself travelling to nearby Prestigious Research University for books and journals which weren't in circulation at NNS. PRU only had reciprocity agreements with other PRUs, so I couldn't ILL materials or check them out in person with my NNS card. Indeed, without a PRU ID I couldn't even enter the library except at certain designated hours, for reasons that had no discernible relation to crowding or public safety. PRU did offer a private membership, but its annual circulation fee was in the hundreds of dollars. It was 2008, and one of the richest universities in the country wanted to charge a student--who was already enrolled in NNS down the street, hardly any kind of flight risk--the equivalent of 20 hours of labor for the privilege of reading books. Now PRU has one of the worst academic cultures I've ever experienced or heard of, and I would be glad to learn that the state of public access to academic libraries is not so dire in general. It remains, though, that it is not always so trivially easy to do academic work at university libraries, even if you're already in "the academy".
- bigfudge 16y ago
  I'm curious, why not name names? Are PRU's librarians that evil?
mechanical_fish 16y ago
If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries Warning: Pet peeve alert. Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some kind of alternative religion in which the priests stand in front of documentary cameras wearing white coats and handing down dogma. Then these scientists turn around and publish most of their actual writing and almost one hundred percent of their data, data-driven reasoning, and detailed experimental design in journals which are prohibitively expensive to read unless you're currently affiliated with a university. Which is, in turn, exorbitantly expensive, either in cash or in opportunity cost. Trying to understand science without reading the primary literature is like trying to understand jazz by reading the New York Times and watching the occasional Ken Burns documentary. Reviewers do write a lot about jazz, and they go on an on about how important and highbrow it all is, but if you haven't actually listened to a jazz piece for more than two minutes you're never going to get the point. Jazz is about the music. Science is about the detailed methods and the data and the literature.

dxjones 16y ago

Prediction: ScienceLeaks will be taken down within 1 week. The only reason it wouldn't be shut down is if nobody uses it. The copyright holders for academic journals have a huge financial incentive to crush ScienceLeaks. The law is on their side, right? ... and why would Google Blogger defend ScienceLeaks? They prefer people to use Google Scholar instead.

roadnottaken 16y ago

This is plain-old piracy and I'm a little surprised to see it getting up-voted on HN. There are plenty of open-access journals, but most scientists choose to publish in closed journals instead for a variety of reasons. I think the results of research funded by taxpayers should be free and, indeed, that is now required by the NIH and there's a huge resource available here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ However some of the research published in traditional journals is funded from elsewhere and, as such, I can't think of any reason why we "deserve" free access to it.

forkandwait 16y ago
For the most part, scientists publish in the highest prestige journal possible, because that counts the most toward tenure/ pay raises/ grant application chances; the most prestigous journals are -- for historical reasons -- still closed since they are profit centers for big for-profit publishing houses like Wiley. On the other hand, all the scientists I know wish they could give their papers away for free because it builds their reputation to have people use and cite them, even undergrads at state colleges that can't afford the bigger database subscriptions. Except for textbooks, scholars almost never make royalties, so the profit incentive isn't what you might think. A scholar makes more money by getting raises from the university, speaking and consulting fees, and publishing undergrad textbooks (sometimes). All of these are increased if their is a wider dissemination of their work. Finally, .... in the US, almost all research is funded by taxpayers, directly or indirectly, it's just NIH funded stuff that must be free. Finally, finally .... if it weren't for the fact that the prestigious journals are a ticket to tenure and promotion, there would be no reason to publish anywhere except for Arxiv: so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system...
- roadnottaken 16y ago
  "so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system..." To misquote Churchill: Peer review is the worst system for scientific publishing... except for all the others.
  - 16y ago

dnautics 16y ago

I wanted to start a 'scienceleaks' site that was actually a site that facilitated the whistleblowing on scientific fraud. A small raffle for a cash prize can be a huge incentive for underpaid grad students.

natnat 16y ago
I don't think a financial incentive for leakers would be a good thing. Wikileaks works fine without offering anyone money.

eplanit 16y ago

The new Misguided Morality: Theft = Liberation.

flipbrad 16y ago
unless, of course, it plays a useful role. an ecosystem can thrive with both predator and prey - even with paratism. Point here, expressed more eloquently above, is that free and unrestricted knowledge can be a tremendously beneficial thing to society. You lock it up for good cause. Do Nature et al provide a useful service, the value of which is commensurate to the fees they charge? I'd argue that they don't: the fees they charge for access are because they have the best papers. One does not submit to Nature on strength of service, but on strength of the goodwill attached to the Nature brand, nurtured mostly through exclusivity. Besides some possible but implausible effect as an effective signal-to-noise filter (which I would argue it isn't, given that it is so exclusive, being largely faithful to a print format which has limited capacity), that's not a very good reason to prevent those with curiosity about the world - but who don't have $32 per article they want to read. Piracy of this sort, if it could be kept to those that would not otherwise purchase this article at any profitable price point for the journal, could actually be economically/education-optimal, perhaps? Also, the last time I checked, copyright had exceptions for academic use. Although I think these are usually limited to copying/reproduction, not the right of publication/distribution, I find these to be distinctions that just aren't warranted in the digital era.

zzzeek 16y ago

DMCA in 3..2...1...