10 ms·

Sci-Hub: Scientists, Academics, Teachers and Students Protest Blocking Lawsuit

212 points by parsecs 6y ago

rektide 6y ago
There was a recent HN post about the Indian government considering buying a bulk subscription to scientific journals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621809 Just my own 2c, part of what makes this whole thing so frustrating & confounding is that it's hard to tell how valuable a paper is going to be to you until you've read it. Reading abstracts gives some idea, but there's plenty of papers that end up being not that interesting. Given the extreme price these journals charge for individual access, the it becomes extremely hard to survey & locate & subsequently purchase relevant research.
- f6v 6y ago
  90% of papers I read turn out useless. I have a hard time finding good review articles among all that watered-down garbage. If I had to pay to view each one or even subscribe...I wouldn’t get too far.
  - sabas123 6y ago
    At the same time, that other 10% might be completely invaluable. Which makes this entire situation such a mess :/
  - signaru 6y ago
    it is for this reason that I am biased to papers from the 90s and earlier (for certain fields). when there are less papers churned out of desperation to fulfill university degree requirements or yet another use case report of a third party's framework/library.
vixen99 6y ago
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/another-journal-flips/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/another-journal-flip... Tim Gowers offers some background to the overwhelming case for open access publication. Sci-hub is an example of an almost inevitable reaction to the blatant profiteering by certain academic publishers. Let's remember that in the main, taxpayers across the world, through their governments, almost alone, pay for the very expensive business of carrying out university and institutional research and preparing manuscripts for publication.
- armoredkitten 6y ago
  And they pay for it multiple times over. They pay once for the researchers carrying out the work, and then they pay again for the reviewers, who provide their peer review services for free (i.e., not paid by the journal). Then, they pay for it a third time when universities (the government-funded ones, at least) have to pay exorbitant subscription fees to access the research.
  - mc32 6y ago
    I think there’s some commingling in this argument. When an institution subscribed they are getting access to research done by _other_ institutions. Presumably they have their own records of their own research.
    - 0xdde 6y ago
      There isn't. He is pointing out that publicly funded research is then not freely available to the public.
    - madhadron 6y ago
      Not really. Sure, you could go get the paper from the guy down the hall, but most universities don't have their own hub for publications that is accessible to their faculty.
      - ChrisLomont 6y ago
        So there's some value in a central hub, which I assume also costs money to set up and run?
        sooheon 6y ago
        Which scihub provides. Journals are their own silos and require multiple exorbitant subscriptions.
        6y ago
sradman 6y ago
I think the fundamental problem is that academics historically gave away their copyright [1]: > Traditionally, the author of an article was required to transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers claimed this was necessary in order to protect author's rights, and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish instead. I'd love to learn more about how this system evolved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic_publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic...
- fractallyte 6y ago
  Because those academics were (and are) a bunch of egotistical, money-grubbing fools who would rather sell up their scientific integrity in exchange for some imaginary 'reputation' points. Science is science, it shouldn't matter where it's published.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    it shouldn't matter where it's published But it does, there's a limited amount of hours in the day and an infinite amount of papers. You need someone to pre-screen the torrent of crap that has an occasional jewel floating in it, and traditionally journal editors have served that role.
    - fractallyte 6y ago
      That's the purpose of peer review. You don't need some pompous journal for that. How many Open Source projects are managed by an individual, or a small dedicated group? If they can do it - by self organising! - it's baffling that some of the 'smartest' minds in the world are unable to comprehend what's going on in their field on a meta-level.
      - dariosalvi78 6y ago
        We are all very aware of it, but it's not easy to get out of it if the people that pay you measure you based on those metrics. Open access is partially solving the problem though and imposing open access to all publicly funded research seems to me a good compromise.
silexia 6y ago
Patents and copyrights in many cases have become a tumor, destroying their original purposes to enable rent seeking from disgusting and harmful organizations.
- namibj 6y ago
  Every time I tried to find reasons for their continued existence strong enough to outweigh obvious downsides, I was met with utter failure. Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties. Patron and Kickstarter have shown that we are very much capable of funding artists remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the latter. As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined); as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the https://www.mpegla.com/ https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they administer). I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and tanking the higher bandwidth costs). Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose. As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum, financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if it ever happens to get sold. It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction, where the study administrators calculate the required budget, and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't happen. I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system. In the movie industry, people would put their money where their mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall get a first season. There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an example.
m3kw9 6y ago
Scihub is awesome but protesting copyright laws isn’t the solution, just like scihub is just a patch to the faulty system
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  How is protesting particular laws wrong? What else can people do? The problem is they seem to protest enforcement of a law rather than the law itself.
- f6v 6y ago
  > protesting ... laws isn’t the solution That’s gonna be my favorite quote here.
- vageli 6y ago
  Civil disobedience is sometimes required to rebut laws society no longer agrees with.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    You'd say that Scihub has crossed the line from civil disobedience into outright insurrection. That said, librarians were trying to work within the system, including raising public consciousness, unsubscribing whole journal packages that included high-profile journals, and nothing happened until Scihub came along. It's the best argument against Kriton that I've seen.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Better known in English as Crito: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crito
      - HarryHirsch 6y ago
        Translation and interpretation here: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/194989942X https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/194989942X 100 % can recommend.
ativzzz 6y ago
I would be more supportive of their cause if Libgen was limited to academic books, but I've found nearly every fiction/nonfiction book I've wanted to on there; it was just a standard book piracy website to me.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  The case for textbooks is much weaker than papers as, although it's basically implied that most won't make any money, it's an almost herculean task to write a good textbook (of 1k pages let's say). I steal all my papers (I am a member of the tyre society - ladies queue up please... - because it's so obscure I can't find them on Sci-Hub) but I don't mind paying for textbooks on principle.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new edition every other year, with slightly different pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price. In the past, prices were more reasonable, and you'd buy standard texts to build a personal library because you'd enter the profession; nowadays it's all about fleecing students, who need a college degree to enter the workforce. The social contract around textbooks has broken down as much as it has around journals.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      > The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new edition every other year, with slightly different pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price. This is what really gets me. I don't necessarily mind charging $150 new for a big textbook, especially given the likelihood of it being shoveled back into the used market, but when the used textbook market is also killed off via gimmicks like new editions that do little more than shuffle exercises or one-time-use online codes, the justification for that high initial price tag is lost. And I say this as somebody who also curated a personal library of textbooks that I do refer to in my day-to-day work!
      - 6y ago
civilized 6y ago
I cannot tell you how hilarious it is to me that the by-far-easiest part of research - the incredibly trivial act of posting a paper on a website - is the only part that is privatized and immensely profitable
stevespang 6y ago
Heh, Indians will just use TOR or VPN's to get around any blockage
at_a_remove 6y ago
While I am fairly sympathetic to the cause in the abstract, as someone who had to clean up after various incursions from the folks doing the mass downloading, the methods ... let's just say that they have externalities that I and many others end up having to deal with.
cblconfederate 6y ago
And this comes in the middle of a pandemic, when so many scientists cannot even go to work to access those papers.
pixel_tracing 6y ago
A lot of people arguing about scientists should just publish to their “group” journal for free. You all are missing a key piece though, these scientists are trained / conditioned to believe that getting “published in a top paid journal” is prestigious so they jump at the chance to do it. We simultaneously need a campaign to make publishing in these paid journals unsexy _and_ have it be freely published.

212 points by parsecs 6y ago

There was a recent HN post about the Indian government considering buying a bulk subscription to scientific journals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621809 Just my own 2c, part of what makes this whole thing so frustrating & confounding is that it's hard to tell how valuable a paper is going to be to you until you've read it. Reading abstracts gives some idea, but there's plenty of papers that end up being not that interesting. Given the extreme price these journals charge for individual access, the it becomes extremely hard to survey & locate & subsequently purchase relevant research.

f6v 6y ago
90% of papers I read turn out useless. I have a hard time finding good review articles among all that watered-down garbage. If I had to pay to view each one or even subscribe...I wouldn’t get too far.
- sabas123 6y ago
  At the same time, that other 10% might be completely invaluable. Which makes this entire situation such a mess :/
- signaru 6y ago
  it is for this reason that I am biased to papers from the 90s and earlier (for certain fields). when there are less papers churned out of desperation to fulfill university degree requirements or yet another use case report of a third party's framework/library.

vixen99 6y ago

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/another-journal-flips/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/another-journal-flip... Tim Gowers offers some background to the overwhelming case for open access publication. Sci-hub is an example of an almost inevitable reaction to the blatant profiteering by certain academic publishers. Let's remember that in the main, taxpayers across the world, through their governments, almost alone, pay for the very expensive business of carrying out university and institutional research and preparing manuscripts for publication.

armoredkitten 6y ago
And they pay for it multiple times over. They pay once for the researchers carrying out the work, and then they pay again for the reviewers, who provide their peer review services for free (i.e., not paid by the journal). Then, they pay for it a third time when universities (the government-funded ones, at least) have to pay exorbitant subscription fees to access the research.
- mc32 6y ago
  I think there’s some commingling in this argument. When an institution subscribed they are getting access to research done by _other_ institutions. Presumably they have their own records of their own research.
  - 0xdde 6y ago
    There isn't. He is pointing out that publicly funded research is then not freely available to the public.
  - madhadron 6y ago
    Not really. Sure, you could go get the paper from the guy down the hall, but most universities don't have their own hub for publications that is accessible to their faculty.
    - ChrisLomont 6y ago
      So there's some value in a central hub, which I assume also costs money to set up and run?
      - sooheon 6y ago
        Which scihub provides. Journals are their own silos and require multiple exorbitant subscriptions.
        6y ago

sradman 6y ago

I think the fundamental problem is that academics historically gave away their copyright [1]: > Traditionally, the author of an article was required to transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers claimed this was necessary in order to protect author's rights, and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish instead. I'd love to learn more about how this system evolved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic_publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic...

fractallyte 6y ago
Because those academics were (and are) a bunch of egotistical, money-grubbing fools who would rather sell up their scientific integrity in exchange for some imaginary 'reputation' points. Science is science, it shouldn't matter where it's published.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  it shouldn't matter where it's published But it does, there's a limited amount of hours in the day and an infinite amount of papers. You need someone to pre-screen the torrent of crap that has an occasional jewel floating in it, and traditionally journal editors have served that role.
  - fractallyte 6y ago
    That's the purpose of peer review. You don't need some pompous journal for that. How many Open Source projects are managed by an individual, or a small dedicated group? If they can do it - by self organising! - it's baffling that some of the 'smartest' minds in the world are unable to comprehend what's going on in their field on a meta-level.
    - dariosalvi78 6y ago
      We are all very aware of it, but it's not easy to get out of it if the people that pay you measure you based on those metrics. Open access is partially solving the problem though and imposing open access to all publicly funded research seems to me a good compromise.

silexia 6y ago

Patents and copyrights in many cases have become a tumor, destroying their original purposes to enable rent seeking from disgusting and harmful organizations.

namibj 6y ago
Every time I tried to find reasons for their continued existence strong enough to outweigh obvious downsides, I was met with utter failure. Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties. Patron and Kickstarter have shown that we are very much capable of funding artists remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the latter. As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined); as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the https://www.mpegla.com/ https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they administer). I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and tanking the higher bandwidth costs). Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose. As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum, financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if it ever happens to get sold. It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction, where the study administrators calculate the required budget, and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't happen. I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system. In the movie industry, people would put their money where their mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall get a first season. There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an example.

m3kw9 6y ago

Scihub is awesome but protesting copyright laws isn’t the solution, just like scihub is just a patch to the faulty system

qwerty456127 6y ago
How is protesting particular laws wrong? What else can people do? The problem is they seem to protest enforcement of a law rather than the law itself.
f6v 6y ago
> protesting ... laws isn’t the solution That’s gonna be my favorite quote here.
vageli 6y ago
Civil disobedience is sometimes required to rebut laws society no longer agrees with.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  You'd say that Scihub has crossed the line from civil disobedience into outright insurrection. That said, librarians were trying to work within the system, including raising public consciousness, unsubscribing whole journal packages that included high-profile journals, and nothing happened until Scihub came along. It's the best argument against Kriton that I've seen.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Better known in English as Crito: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crito
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      Translation and interpretation here: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/194989942X https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/194989942X 100 % can recommend.

ativzzz 6y ago

I would be more supportive of their cause if Libgen was limited to academic books, but I've found nearly every fiction/nonfiction book I've wanted to on there; it was just a standard book piracy website to me.

mhh__ 6y ago
The case for textbooks is much weaker than papers as, although it's basically implied that most won't make any money, it's an almost herculean task to write a good textbook (of 1k pages let's say). I steal all my papers (I am a member of the tyre society - ladies queue up please... - because it's so obscure I can't find them on Sci-Hub) but I don't mind paying for textbooks on principle.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new edition every other year, with slightly different pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price. In the past, prices were more reasonable, and you'd buy standard texts to build a personal library because you'd enter the profession; nowadays it's all about fleecing students, who need a college degree to enter the workforce. The social contract around textbooks has broken down as much as it has around journals.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    > The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new edition every other year, with slightly different pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price. This is what really gets me. I don't necessarily mind charging $150 new for a big textbook, especially given the likelihood of it being shoveled back into the used market, but when the used textbook market is also killed off via gimmicks like new editions that do little more than shuffle exercises or one-time-use online codes, the justification for that high initial price tag is lost. And I say this as somebody who also curated a personal library of textbooks that I do refer to in my day-to-day work!
    - 6y ago

civilized 6y ago

I cannot tell you how hilarious it is to me that the by-far-easiest part of research - the incredibly trivial act of posting a paper on a website - is the only part that is privatized and immensely profitable

stevespang 6y ago

Heh, Indians will just use TOR or VPN's to get around any blockage

at_a_remove 6y ago

While I am fairly sympathetic to the cause in the abstract, as someone who had to clean up after various incursions from the folks doing the mass downloading, the methods ... let's just say that they have externalities that I and many others end up having to deal with.

cblconfederate 6y ago

And this comes in the middle of a pandemic, when so many scientists cannot even go to work to access those papers.

pixel_tracing 6y ago

A lot of people arguing about scientists should just publish to their “group” journal for free. You all are missing a key piece though, these scientists are trained / conditioned to believe that getting “published in a top paid journal” is prestigious so they jump at the chance to do it. We simultaneously need a campaign to make publishing in these paid journals unsexy _and_ have it be freely published.