4 ms·

Alexandra Elbakyan is probably one of the individuals who did the most for science in the recent years. And she is considered a criminal. We live in a crazy tim

• catacombs 7y ago
  She's named a criminal by those who stand to lose money from Sci-Hub, aka the greedy publishers and suits who try to profit off the scientific community.
  • pen2l 7y ago
    Nature, Science, et al. have two important jobs: 1) Being a good filter, increasing S:N, so you don't have to waste time sieving bullshit yourself 2) Choosing pretty fonts, promoting good stylistic standards and guidelines (which scientists, unfortunately, usually tend not to do great on if left to their devices) It is I think an acceptable argument that charging an exorbitant price for articles is a bit of a scam, but I don't think it's fair to say that they should earn 0, or that the value they create is of 0 price. Consider that each of Science, Nature, Cell employ a couple hundred employees. If you want a good sieve, you've gotta hire talented editors, if you want articles that are easy to read and easy to understand, you've gotta hire talented graphics artists. Suddenly, this doesn't seem so easy and cheap.
    • barry-cotter 7y ago
      Papers in Nature and Science replicate at lower levels that journals with lower impact factors. That’s not really doing much for signal:noise. If you’re a working scientist you need to keep on top of your field for yourself. Anyone who relies on _journals_ to tell them what’s hot will be woefully out of date. Academia uses journals for archiving, not for dissemination of current research. That’s what pre-prints, working papers, conferences, workshops and seminars are for. As far as design whether typography or graphic goes Sociological Science charges somewhere around $2,000 per article to authors and it looks just fine. https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-v5-32-752/ https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-v5-32-752/
      • longtom 7y ago
        > Papers in Nature and Science replicate at lower levels that journals with lower impact factors. Source?
        • s0rce 7y ago
          Yah, I'm not sure what they mean. My nature and science papers certainly didn't replicate anything and if they did they wouldn't have published them.
          • jacobolus 7y ago
            The claim is that when other people try to replicate the experiments from papers published in Nature and Science, the success rate is lower than when attempts are made to replicate papers published elsewhere. (I have no knowledge about whether this claim is accurate.)
            • salty_biscuits 7y ago
              It is definitely a thing https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z
            • entrex 7y ago
              another study in _Science_, which examined a more general cross-section of psychology studies and reported an even lower rate of successful replication than the one linked earlier (39%): https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.long https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.long the authors of this study detail at least potential reason for the tendency of high-impact (i.e. widely cited) journals and studies to have lower reproducibility rates: major journals tend to prefer publishing "innovative" studies w/ results that have the potential to push the envelope and advance the state of the art. as a result of this position on the extreme cutting edge, though, those kinds of studies are less likely to have really solid results. at the same time, though, they're more likely to inspire attempts to respond to them in one way or another -- leading to more citations. they note that this emphasis by high-profile journals results in a disincentive to put in the time to do the less glamorous work of reproducing other teams' studies, which is a potentially major issue for the trajectory of science as a whole.
    • jonathankoren 7y ago
      I agree that the filter is where the most value is, but it’s wrong to assume that the publisher is providing it. They’re not. The science community is the ones providing it — for free. Same with publishing templates. The science community itself provides the style guides and style templates. The publishers provide printing presses. That’s it. The scientific community can decide to abandon the publishers, and start competing journals, which will automatically transfer the heft away from the original and to the upstart, because it is the community that provides the value. This may sound idealistic, but this has already happened. The linguistics community abandoned Elsevier’s Lingua and replaced it overnight with Glossa. The linguistic community’s success, then inspired the mathematics community to abandon Springer’s Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics and replace it with Algebraic Combinatorics. This path is traveled. The pattern established. In 2019 it’s just much easier to start a publication since you need very little economic capital.
      • Vinnl 7y ago
        They wouldn't even need to start competing journals - often, there already are alternative journals, or preprints would serve the function of dissemination just fine. The main thing that's needed is that they perform the filtering independently of the publication process. (Disclosure: I'm part of a project that aims to facilitate that.)
    • Illniyar 7y ago
      Practically all computer science research is published openly in arxiv. These papers are self edited and peer reviewed in public. I don't see much difference from when CS papers where in journals
      • forgotmyhnacc 7y ago
        Just a nit, in my personal experience, 8/10 CS papers are available for free. The other 2/10 are CS papers published in IEEE or other closed journals.
      • Vinnl 7y ago
        There's not any filtering being done there though. (Though full disclosure: I'm part of a project that aims to help identify the best preprints, so it's somewhat my thing.)
    • ericd 7y ago
      Given that the vast majority of the papers I read are on Arxiv, linked by researchers online, I just don’t really buy the argument that we need to keep these publishers around. I’m betting that other researchers will still serve as a fine filter.
    • buboard 7y ago
      > Choosing pretty fonts, promoting good stylistic standards I m sorry their standards can be crazy nitpicky and huge time wasters. Some uniformity is desireable, but their guidelines span tens of pages.
    • gjm11 7y ago
      Most of the "sieving" is done by reviewers rather than editors, and reviewers are not paid. (There are some journals that pay their reviewers. I don't think any of them pay them much, and Nature and Science are not among their number in any case.)
  • godzillabrennus 7y ago
    Aka human parasites. Cannot stand it.
  • wespiser_2018 7y ago
    Well, she's technically not a criminal until she has been found guilty in a court of law. Right now, it doesn't appear like she had charges, but she should probably stay out of the US + EU.
  • fragmede 7y ago
    Aaron Swartz did similar with for JSTOR, charged under the CFAA and for wire fraud, to the tune of $1 million and a 35 years jail time sentence. He refused their plea bargain and committed suicide not too long after. I hope the situation here is different enough that she will have a better time than he did.
• throw_xyzyz 7y ago
  In a sane world she would be given the Nobel Prize in every science. After Knuth and Lamport get it in physics for TeX/LaTeX.
  • chongli 7y ago
    In a sane world she would be an unknown, regular person just like the rest of us, because all science would be published open access.
• weinzierl 7y ago
  She single-handedly fulfilled one important part of Google's mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." A part that a company like Google could never fulfill itself.
  • buboard 7y ago
    Sadly they fulfil it in the most restrictive manner: google scholar is given access to every publication, in order to advertise their paywalls
    • leni536 7y ago
      To be fair google scholar lists arxiv preprints as well if available.
  • Iv 7y ago
    To be fair to Google, Youtube really changed the way the MAFIAA reacted to online music and videos. They did that for culture, they failed for science.