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An Interview with Sci-Hub’s Alexandra Elbakyan on the Delhi HC Case
- baali 6y agoFor some more context I would like to share a precedent specifically in India and Delhi that could be relevant to this case as well, "Rameshwari Photocopy Service shop copyright case": https://thewire.in/education/du-photocopy-case https://thewire.in/education/du-photocopy-case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service_shop_copyright_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service_s...
- ficklepickle 6y agoVery interesting, thanks! Relevant quote: Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits students and educational institutions to copy portions from any work for research and educational purpose
- slt2021 6y agowhat a brave woman, she is singlehandedly disrupting the scientific publications cartel
- xkcd-sucks 6y ago"Russian hackers stealing valuable Western IP" actually kind of surprised I haven't heard this yet
- tpmx 6y agoShe's Kazakhstani, not Russian, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan#Views_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan#Views_and_c... > Elbakyan has stated that she is inspired by communist ideals, although she does not consider herself a strict Marxist.] She has stated that she supports a strong state which can stand up to the Western world, and that she does not want "the scientists of Russia and of my native Kazakhstan to share the fates of the scientists of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, that were 'helped' by the USA to become more democratic." ... > In 2017, a species of parasitoid wasps discovered by Russian and Mexican entomologists was named after Elbakyan (Idiogramma elbakyanae). Elbakyan was offended by this, writing, "If you analyse the situation with scientific publications, the real parasites are scientific publishers, and Sci-Hub, on the contrary, fights for equal access to scientific information." Following this event, and in the context of her long-running tense relations with the liberal, pro-Western wing of the Russian scientific community, she blocked access to Sci-Hub for users from the Russian Federation. So basically she's a Putin supporter.
- xyzzy123 6y agoThat seems overly reductive. Must all people who want the USA to do well be "Biden supporters" or "Trump supporters"? I think not.
- tpmx 6y ago(I'm not american.) At the very least we should be able to agree that her goals align remarkably well with Putin's goals. And to be clear: I also believe that freeing scientific information from publishers is a nice goal - it's just that her goal is broader than that.
- pessimizer 6y agoThat famous Marxist, Putin.
- sudosysgen 6y agoPutin is a parasite, a die-hard capitalist, and an oligarch. He isn't anything like Elbakyan ideologically, at all. I'm afraid you're ideologically illiterate.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into political, ideological, and/or nationalistic flamewar. This comment manages to be all three, and it's a step change in the thread—a step down. Let's climb the other way please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tpmx 6y agoYou're of course right. Sorry about that.
- a_bonobo 6y agoScholarly Kitchen is the 'house' blog of the publishing industry, they've run very similar articles >https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-think-sci-hub-is-just-downloading-pdfs-think-again/ https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th... >Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions. Comment 1: >The notion that Sci-Hub is not involved in hacking is laughable. The founder of Sci-Hub, when asked about this, disingenuously replies that Sci-Hub itself does not engage in hacking and phishing, without disputing that it relies on these to operate. More evidence that there is something big and powerful behind Sci-Hub: the Russian mafia. Or this howler, a blog-post on Russian information warfare that then goes into Sci-Hub: >In the scholarly information community, some individuals apparently sympathetic with the open information calls of Sci-Hub and LibGen actively shared authentication information, inadvertently providing institutional credentials to cybercriminals and cyberwarriors, who are probably still sitting on the usernames and passwords or, more likely, the information they grabbed before the passwords were changed. Experts estimate that we’ve seen 1% of the information Wikileaks and the Russians have purloined over the years. >https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/04/03/publishing-in-a-time-of-information-warfare-a-wakeup-call/ https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/04/03/publishing-in...
- sudosysgen 6y agoOh no, the cyber mafia warriors... Taking scientific papers and making them freely available??
- 177tcca 6y agoWhat's the Russian mob's next big play, then, Cartel? Reading cryptocurrency whitepapers, or selling CRISPR service out of the back of a truck? The fact that people still fall for this shit, on both sides of the table, is depressing.
- crumbshot 6y agoAgreed, and with a very pure and selfless motive, in massively broadening access to works of scientific research. Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action, against our broken system where a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
- rualca 6y ago> Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action (...) The scientific journal racket is all but capitalism. It's largely rentism disseminated and fostered by entrenched state and institutional interests and status quo. These publisher's devised a scheme where they not only force highly-educated and trained specialists to produce cutting-edge work for free but also afterwards demand high fees for them to access that same work.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoYes, capitalism is a worthy ideal. But don't forget that rentism is one of its failure modes, and a very common one; I don't think it's inaccurate to describe attempts to fight rentism as anti-capitalist.
- atdrummond 6y agoRent seeking is just as endemic in purportedly socialist/communist countries.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Yes, capitalism is a worthy ideal The “ideals” of capitalism were shallow post-hoc rationalizations that came after people called out the problems resulting from the mode by which the elite mercantile class had replaced the feudal hereditary aristocracy as the class around whose particular interests the political and economic order were organized. It was an improvement over feudalism, but the subsequent improvements have occurred with the general replacement of capitalism, in its original sense, with the modern mixed economy; capitalism is now a reversal of progress, not an ideal to aspire to.
- tasogare 6y agoI didn’t know that Twitter deleted Sci Hub account. That company already had a bad record of political censorship but now it attacks science too. Disgusting. Elbakyan is doing an amazing and important work with Sci-Hub, I hope the site will continue to exist for long.
- colejohnson66 6y agoDespite how you and I feel about Sci-Hub, it is breaking the law. Copyright infringement, whether you agree with it or not, is a crime. If Twitter received notice from the journals’ legal teams to take down the account, they may not have the ability to fight back (depending on the journals’ legal arguments).
- aryamaan 6y agoWhat are the efficient ways to fight unjust laws?
- krastanov 6y agoVoting and contacting your representatives is pretty efficient... Yeah, lobbying from big entities is a problem that we need to solve, but come on, look at what we have already achieved. Convincing the average people around you is frequently more work.
- colejohnson66 6y agoI don’t know. Some would say “take a stand”, but all I know is that: if your legal team says there’s almost no way you’d win a lawsuit from the journals, and that you could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages, you don’t “take a stand”. Because it’s not just the company you’d be taking down, but yourself from the inevitable lawsuits from angry investors. It’s sad, buts it’s the reality we live in.
- brainless 6y agoYou are right. But to add, these laws are lobbied by large corporations that don't care about much other than their profits. Change is hard and it's okay, not everyone will fight for it. But some will.
- sodality2 6y agoI'm on the fence about Sci-hub. Every time I read about it, I remember this article about how they operate. >Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions. This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are losing money, but it has some merit with proof of attacks changing passwords, etc. Real, tangible damage. I'm not sure this is what Aaron Swartz envisioned. I'm all for vigilante justice or whatever pirates use to justify it (seriously, I petitioned my local college to stop subscribing to them) but this is hardly the same thing. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-think-sci-hub-is-just-downloading-pdfs-think-again/ https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th...
- kick 6y agoThat link is transparently pushing something, and what it's pushing definitely isn't "the truth." The only thing, and I repeat: the only thing that absolutely ridiculous, fearmongering, slanderous article even says outright that they do, rather than just blatant speculation, is PDF downloading. Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to come to the attention of publishers or library technical departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made 45,092 PDF requests. What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs. The article insinuates murder but doesn't even try to substantiate their claims of "Oh maybe they're doing something, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe they're doing something evil, yes indeed, maybe they are!" They aren't even trying at this point.
- sodality2 6y agoNo, they say that hackers "not only broke into their database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles" but they admittedly do not attribute that to the group. >What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.
- neatze 6y agoHypothetically, can publishers go after authors who used sci-hub ?
- TT3351 6y agoI'm willing to bet publishers understand that will make any remaining good will they have with the people who generate their content evaporate
- srswtf123 6y agoHostages aren’t usually full good will, and hostage takers aren’t the best negotiators.
- lou1306 6y agoThey could, but the optics of such an action would be really, really bad. Moreover, my gut feeling is that most researchers that use sci-hub could obtain most of the papers through their employer's subscription anyway. It's just that the UX of Sci-Hub is so much better.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoAcademic journals pose many problems: 1) They restrict access to research with paywalls. 2) The research they publish is usually funded with public funds. Governments do not get money from journals. 3) The work being published is produced by researchers. Researchers do not get any money from the journals. 4) Journals rarely verify what they publish. So, in short, Sci-Hub is a necessary disobedience movement that aims to end with the most pointless institution in academia: paid journals. This is not the same as Napster.
- kikokikokiko 6y ago"This is not the same as Napster" - It's the same thing. Knowledge, when left to it's own nature, wants to be free and spread. The digital music revolution is just another aspect of this same concept, I never ever paid for any string of bits in my life, and never will. As an app developer, I implement all the tricks I know to stop people from pirating my work, but if they KNOW how to do it, and ARE WILLING to do it, good for them.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoNapster is different. The fact you do not want to pay for music does not make it free to produce, promote and distribute. There is real time and money involved in songwriting, composing, interpreting, recording, marketing, etc. In this case, the journals paid nothing for the research they publish, and they share none of the money they make. An analogy for a journal would be a napster that forces you to publish your music there and then doesn't pay you anything.
- kikokikokiko 6y agoScihub and Napster are "the same thing", in the sense that both are tools that were created to enable the peer to peer sharing of information, one bypasses the journals middlemen, the other the record labels. Information is meant to be free, anything that tries to stop it is going against the nature of info. The way I see it's like trying to stop entropy, good luck trying to create your perpetual motion machine.
- neatze 6y agoHow many scientist agree that people who access there's paper should pay ~$30 ?
- danielyaa5 6y agoprobably any of them that publish to a journal, the scientist could make it public themselves if they wanted to. This is theft...
- colejohnson66 6y agoMy understanding is that the universities have contracts with the journals that mandate the professors and researchers publish in the journal with almost no exceptions. You’re putting the blame in the wrong place.
- danielyaa5 6y agothen they are stealing money from universities... essentially the scientist is agreeing to work pay free for the university by attending it. What do you think the money for the university is used for?
- nimih 6y agoWho, exactly, do you think gets the money from journal access fees? I'll give you a hint, it's not the people who write the articles, nor the people who peer-review them, nor the universities who employ either group.
- krastanov 6y ago> the scientist is agreeing to work pay free for the university by attending it This statement makes me think you significantly misunderstand how scientists / universities function. The scientists (graduate students, postdocs, professors, staff) are all salaried employees of the university. The university does take some of the grant money given to lead professors (e.g. to pay the aforementioned salaries).
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- xvilka 6y agoAll of these publishers are also an impediment for the progress. Just look at more modern approach for the scientific publishing - Authorea[1], PubPub[2], some similar platforms. [1] https://www.authorea.com/ https://www.authorea.com/ [2] https://www.pubpub.org/ https://www.pubpub.org/
- Fomite 6y agoNew, modern publishing mechanisms have, unfortunately, by and large not solved the career incentives that surround academic publishing.
- oli5679 6y agoGuerilla Open Access Manifesto Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy https://gist.github.com/usmanity/4522840 https://gist.github.com/usmanity/4522840 "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"
- crumbshot 6y ago> The problem is that publishers are not actual creators of these works, scientists are – they do all the work, and academic publishers simply use their position of power in the Republic of Science to extract unjust profits. Sci-Hub does not enable piracy where creative people are deprived of the reward they deserve. It is a very different thing. This has strong parallels with how the parasitic private sector, in its endless thirst for profit above all else, ruins so many other things that would be better run through public provision: housing, medical care, etc.
- juskrey 6y agoAs someone who have escaped from places with public housing and healthcare provision, I suspect you were never really experiencing that. Some place for wise regulation - maybe. That said, a parallel is very poor. Modern academia is a zero sum morally corrupt game, guilty of many sins on its own.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pizza 6y agoMaybe you should elaborate on why you think academia is a zero sum game. Like e.g. for one researcher to get a grant, another one doesn't?
- juskrey 6y agoLike you have said, this is obvious. Same with academic positions. In real life, if you think you know better, you go start your own business and don't wait until all your enemies die out.
- geomark 6y agoHaving experienced, in a couple of very different countries, the difference between public and private housing and healthcare I know which one I prefer. No experience as an insider in academia so can't comment on that.
- dilawar 6y agoPublic mone is spent two times for a paper: first time to publish and second time to read it. OpenAccess for a higher charge is becoming a norm though. Some positives. Mathematics community has done a good job at making many open access journals. Biology has only a few: eLife being the most prominent.
- Barrin92 6y agoNot unsurprisingly a lot of comments are very negative on publishers but I think the nature of the criticism is kind of weird. Publishers in almost every comment as well in the interview are almost always portrayed as institutions that rip everyone off. But this is strange, because if it was true, everyone would just stop paying them, they don't literally hold anyone at gunpoint. In the most basic sense what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention. Being on the cover of reputable journals for a scientist is like being on the cover of Vogue for a fashionista. When people in India rip off scientific articles using sci-hub they don't compete with the core business model of publishers, they just want knowledge. But journals aren't really in the business of selling knowledge in the first place. Journals survive sci-hub for the same reason Harvard survives free lectures of YouTube and Hollywood survived ripped blue-rays on street-markets. Because these institutions are not in the business of selling textbooks or movies, they sell celebrities and status. So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling.
- rhaps0dy 6y ago> So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling. That's a very good analysis, I think, but it overlooks that an internet attention economy is a better state. In the field of machine learning, it has already come to pass. All the top publishing venues (the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the conferences NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ...) are already free of charge and open access for everyone. There are many problems with reviews in those venues (mostly growing pains from the rapidly increasing number of submissions, and problems stemming from the fact that there is 1 single round of review), and indeed the conferences, JMLR and Twitter are now the "attention economy" of the field. But it has massive positive externalities, namely, you don't need to pay (or have your university pay) for access to the research anymore. The system works as badly (or as well) as it would with the publishers, but without giving them a cut.
- giomasce 6y agoThe thing I am concerned about with SciHub is its centralized nature. So far it has resisted everything, but supposed that eventually Elsevier manages to land Elbakyan in jail, or hack back SciHub and delete its content, what would happen? I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities can back it up. And I'd also be happy if the paper collection segment was free software, so that other entities could cooperate in case the original SciHub went down.
- xkeysc0re 6y agoThere are several ongoing efforts to maintain an archive of SciHub https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8ky647/scihub_repository_torrents_of_scientific_papers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8ky647/scihub_... https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7jxb/archivists-are-trying-to-make-sure-a-pirate-bay-of-science-never-goes-down https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7jxb/archivists-are-trying... The paper collection software, if I recall correctly, is actually quite simple and uses APIs provided by publishers. It's the store of credentials that SciHub uses (that are provided by academics and scientists) which truly powers the site
- jerheinze 6y ago> I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities can back it up. For IPFS have a look at https://libgen.fun/ https://libgen.fun/ and https://freeread.org/ipfs/ https://freeread.org/ipfs/ Also see the HN thread on those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209246
- m-p-3 6y agoSomething like https://collab.ipfscluster.io/ https://collab.ipfscluster.io/, where you could simply decide to become part of the cluster and host data would be nice. Maybe with some granularity, because I doubt many of us would have enough storage to spare to mirror the whole thing.
- j-james 6y ago
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