5 ms·
Given how beneficial sci-hub is, there ought to be some way that the scientific community can formally recognise this, as a way of legitimizing her cause. Some
by ajb 5y ago
Given how beneficial sci-hub is, there ought to be some way that the scientific community can formally recognise this, as a way of legitimizing her cause.
Some ways I can think of:
* Get her elected as rector of a university. Contraversial figures are sometimes elected as Rector, at least in the UK, because students are the electorate. However for the same reason this isn't considered especially prestigious by people who know this.
* Fund and create an academic post specifically for her (Ptolomy II Professor of the ethics of copyright strikes me a a suitably biting title [1])
* Nominate her to some well known prize
[1] Ptolomy II decreed that any book found in a ship in the port of Alexandria should be copied by the scribes of his library - with or without the permission of the owner. The UK actually has a similar law in that publishers are required to send copies of any book published in the UK to the British Library
- kzrdude 5y agoHonorary doctorate, maybe?
- pieter_mj 5y agoElbakyan's contribution to humanity is way bigger than that and cannot be overstated. An honorary doctorate from many major international universities, maybe. Her effort deserves to be rewarded with the nobel peace prize, imsvho.
- kzrdude 5y agoIt would be neat if she was awarded 1/2 or 1/3 of the medicine or chemistry prize for example
- caleb-allen 5y agoI attempted an undergraduate degree in the US and dropped out after 2 years because I struggled in the context and hadn't learned the discipline I needed to get through each semester. Since then, I've become so enthusiastic about academia in large part because of sci-hub. For all my interests I can find papers and access them with no institutional affiliation. I've learned how I learn, gained valuable research skills, and am planning on re-applying to finish a bachelor's degree! Although I come from a place of privilege I owe a great debt to sci hub. I can't imagine how critical it is for those outside my bubble, where institutions might not have great access in the first place.
- SimbalayaShlim 5y agoNobel Peace Prize. Seriously. https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/ https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/
- danohuiginn 5y agoBook prefaces commonly acknowledge the libraries where the author has done research; sci-hub deserves to go there if they have been using it. It's a shame Elbakyan hasn't written a paper about sci-hub that people can cite. Many software packages do that, to give academics an obvious way to cite them. On nominations: the Nobel nomination process is very open (iirc, any relevant professor can make a nomination). For that reason it is also largely meaningless, but that doesn't stop many people boasting about it, and chunks of the media enabling them. So this is leaning a long way towards fake news, but is also something a single person could do.
- danohuiginn 5y agoFrom the article: [Publishers claim sites like Sci-Hub] “have no incentive to ensure the accuracy of scientific articles, no incentive to ensure published papers meet ethical standards, and no incentive to retract or correct articles if issues arise.” The correct response to this should be to always note in citations when a paper was accessed through sci-hub. Then the reader is warned, and can compare against the canonical version if they are worried.
- miohtama 5y agoPublishers have little incentive to ensure the accuracy of papers as well... The science has changed to fake paper mill to advance the careers of people in the countries with weak institutions. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5
- dredmorbius 5y agoSci-Hub is a library, a repository, not a publisher. The original article publisher has editorial responsibility for article selection, not Sci-Hub, just as with any repository. The accuracy of articles themselves and the integrity of them is trivial to establish as SciHub, LibGen, and ZLibrary all index principally on checksums of files. If there's a modification, the checksums will reveal which items are affected. Note the MD5 hash provided for Stephen Breyer's seminal article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright" (1970): 8F8B57972236B04621795C49A15E8C2E http://libgen.rs/scimag/10.2307%2F1339714 http://libgen.rs/scimag/10.2307%2F1339714
- ajb 5y agoAlso: Those of you in academia, please have a think about whether you, personally, could kick off one of these, or one of the suggestions in replies.