6 ms·

SciHub doesn't have value so much as Elsevier has "anti-value". Scihub is a space without the negative effect of Elsevier gatekeeping, thus seeming to have a ne

by Chris2048 6y ago

SciHub doesn't have value so much as Elsevier has "anti-value". Scihub is a space without the negative effect of Elsevier gatekeeping, thus seeming to have a net positive effect. Instead of doing anything at all with SciHub, we should instead fight Elsevier. First blow should be on the basis that Elsevier is anti-competitive, by the logic that if wasn't there would be no reason for it to succeed at all. Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available, or at least not derive any profit from discouraging public access.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I don't get it, if there wasn't a SciHub where would a person get free-gratis access to all scientific papers in one place (without being tracked AFAIAA, nor advertised to!). SciHub seems to have value beyond any "anti-value" Elsevier has. SciHub use is tortuous infringement in my country, this comment is in not way an endorsement of its use.
- semi-extrinsic 6y ago
  ArXiv and a long list of other free repositories are way better than SciHub for legally sharing free-gratis access to scientific papers. Yes there are many such repositories, but all are indexed e.g. by Google Scholar.
  - TheTrotters 6y ago
    Why are they better than one place that has everything? (Asking in good faith)
    - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
      Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership. We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine. Then you have several national and institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of those groups. Etc. etc.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > Content organization is key. It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
        semi-extrinsic 6y ago
        You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a paper, you can click an authors name and see their other papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv and not by Sci-Hub. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Revision history is very nice, but arXiv has only a subset of papers. There are other easy ways to go from an author's name to the list of their publications; often copying and pasting the name into Google is enough. My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20. > But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives? Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances). And to extend my thought from prior comment: > Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
specialp 6y ago
Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. If we had a world where there were a large number of people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could easily not have any publishers at all, and no subscriptions or article processing charges. Currently locking people out of information that is often funded with public money is not good for society. So having a small publication charge that can be covered in research is a good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward system of publication with impact factors and citations is indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But there is a lot more work that is thought of in the publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost you time without a finished product. All of this does not cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.
  - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
    That’s a lot smaller than I expected, means they’re spending a lot of money on something
    - owenversteeg 6y ago
      This isn't intended as personal criticism of your comment, but I've noticed that people with minimal experience in business often overestimate margins and don't entirely understand what they mean. A 37% margin is crazy high and truly exceptional; there are only a handful of businesses that profitable at scale. When you hear a 30%+ margin, think of businesses like Mastercard, that collect a percentage of most transactions that its 1B+ members conduct. Apple also has notoriously high margins for what they do, and theirs are at 18%. Most of the businesses people interact with in their daily life have low or even negative profit margins: Walmart 3%, restaurants ~2%, Uber -35%. All the storefronts are owned by commercial real estate groups (margins usually ~4%), gas stations are ~2%, travel, car dealerships, airlines etc are all very low margin. My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism not working right. Occasionally margins are high because of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top handful of most profitable businesses in the world, making basically all their money on interchange. As a result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in return, right? Fraud protection and security and support and all these important things - what would we do without them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2% in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since. Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add zero value. And even if you like those businesses, there's an even more compelling case for regulating away Elsevier in its entirety.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
How about we target the laws that enable this obnoxious gatekeeping in the first place? We should simply get rid of copyright.
ballenf 6y ago
If collecting, organizing huge data sets and creating good (or at least functional) UI for convenient access has zero value... that will be news to a bunch of people here. And also Netflix.
- RenThraysk 6y ago
  You mean like public libraries?
Ankaios 6y ago
Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available Federal agencies with research expenditures greater than than $100 million annually (which covers most federally funded research) are required to make publications they fund publicly available. This press release links to the executive order, which is still in force: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi.... The policy allows journals to generally have a one-year embargo, and agencies are allowed some latitude in how they implement the order, but most new federally funded research should become freely available on places like PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) after embargoes expire.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

I don't get it, if there wasn't a SciHub where would a person get free-gratis access to all scientific papers in one place (without being tracked AFAIAA, nor advertised to!). SciHub seems to have value beyond any "anti-value" Elsevier has. SciHub use is tortuous infringement in my country, this comment is in not way an endorsement of its use.

semi-extrinsic 6y ago
ArXiv and a long list of other free repositories are way better than SciHub for legally sharing free-gratis access to scientific papers. Yes there are many such repositories, but all are indexed e.g. by Google Scholar.
- TheTrotters 6y ago
  Why are they better than one place that has everything? (Asking in good faith)
  - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
    Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership. We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine. Then you have several national and institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of those groups. Etc. etc.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > Content organization is key. It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
      - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
        You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a paper, you can click an authors name and see their other papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv and not by Sci-Hub. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Revision history is very nice, but arXiv has only a subset of papers. There are other easy ways to go from an author's name to the list of their publications; often copying and pasting the name into Google is enough. My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20. > But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives? Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances). And to extend my thought from prior comment: > Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.

specialp 6y ago

Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. If we had a world where there were a large number of people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could easily not have any publishers at all, and no subscriptions or article processing charges. Currently locking people out of information that is often funded with public money is not good for society. So having a small publication charge that can be covered in research is a good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward system of publication with impact factors and citations is indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But there is a lot more work that is thought of in the publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost you time without a finished product. All of this does not cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.

marcinzm 6y ago
>Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.
- GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
  That’s a lot smaller than I expected, means they’re spending a lot of money on something
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    This isn't intended as personal criticism of your comment, but I've noticed that people with minimal experience in business often overestimate margins and don't entirely understand what they mean. A 37% margin is crazy high and truly exceptional; there are only a handful of businesses that profitable at scale. When you hear a 30%+ margin, think of businesses like Mastercard, that collect a percentage of most transactions that its 1B+ members conduct. Apple also has notoriously high margins for what they do, and theirs are at 18%. Most of the businesses people interact with in their daily life have low or even negative profit margins: Walmart 3%, restaurants ~2%, Uber -35%. All the storefronts are owned by commercial real estate groups (margins usually ~4%), gas stations are ~2%, travel, car dealerships, airlines etc are all very low margin. My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism not working right. Occasionally margins are high because of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top handful of most profitable businesses in the world, making basically all their money on interchange. As a result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in return, right? Fraud protection and security and support and all these important things - what would we do without them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2% in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since. Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add zero value. And even if you like those businesses, there's an even more compelling case for regulating away Elsevier in its entirety.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

How about we target the laws that enable this obnoxious gatekeeping in the first place? We should simply get rid of copyright.

ballenf 6y ago

If collecting, organizing huge data sets and creating good (or at least functional) UI for convenient access has zero value... that will be news to a bunch of people here. And also Netflix.

RenThraysk 6y ago
You mean like public libraries?

Ankaios 6y ago

Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available Federal agencies with research expenditures greater than than $100 million annually (which covers most federally funded research) are required to make publications they fund publicly available. This press release links to the executive order, which is still in force: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi.... The policy allows journals to generally have a one-year embargo, and agencies are allowed some latitude in how they implement the order, but most new federally funded research should become freely available on places like PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) after embargoes expire.