3 ms·

No, she’s not in real trouble this time. What seems to be in trouble is getting new papers on to Sci-Hub and it becoming a little bit less relevant over time.

by wtmt 5y ago

No, she’s not in real trouble this time. What seems to be in trouble is getting new papers on to Sci-Hub and it becoming a little bit less relevant over time. The courts here in India are notoriously slow on many cases. Depending on luck, the hearings don’t even start for a long time after an initial notice is sent to defendants. If the publishers are able to push the court for an earlier hearing, we’ll know how soon Sci-Hub can get back on track (surely she’s not going to stop maintaining the site and stop uploading new papers regardless of how the case turns out). I don’t think the publishers would be content with just new papers not being uploaded. If the case drags on, the backlog of newer papers to upload may become an immense effort that may create some “holes” in the data archive. I just hope the court decides sooner and we can get on with Sci-Hub growing. P.S.: This link shared in another comment worked for me without any CAPTCHA prompts - https://archive.ph/huNwk https://archive.ph/huNwk

jacobolus 5y ago
> getting new papers on to Sci-Hub and it becoming a little bit less relevant over time Sci-Hub is just as relevant as ever. What has happened is that paywalled papers published in 2021 are losing a substantial proportion of their readers and potential citations, and their future impact will be depressed compared to papers from previous years. Even when Sci-Hub starts adding papers again, there may be a significant permanent effect. Unestablished researchers publishing important early-career papers in paywalled journals are getting harmed.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  > Unestablished researchers publishing important early-career papers in paywalled journals are getting harmed. I'm always amazed at the lack of will to change what everyone agrees is a problem.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    It has little to do with will, and much more with building a scientific career. Unless you meant that the way academia is structured is the problem here. Because it is and it leads to these excesses. Publishing, itself an acknowledged problem, is being addressed. But slowly, very slowly. Because the incentives in academia do not point to risk taking.
  - slx26 5y ago
    It's always lack and coordination and power, not lack of will. There might be around a thousand scientists in the world that are relevant enough to be able to contact other big names and try to get the whole scientific community on board, not only with a massive effort to make the problem well known to the general public and try to gather enough attention to it, but also making some specific proposals on how this can be solved, and proposing some rather drastic measures if laws are not changed, like getting scientists to agree to ignore any paper that's not released freely and publicly online, and trying to get the media and everyone else on board. But those big names are usually very busy already, and doing useful things. Not more useful than this, but translating from will to coordination is one of the biggest problems preventing humanity from making the world a better place. Some essays like "meditations on moloch" have discussed this problem in more detail if you are interested, but the key idea is that existing power dynamics and the interests and willingness to cheat or be "cleverer" of a minority can deeply compromise the game for everyone else, moving the individual "rational" decision (low risk) very far away from the collective optimal.
- IlliOnato 5y ago
  I am curious about this. Isn't it the case that most interesting new articles are available on ArXiv or one of the newer preprint repositories that seem now to pop up every day (often with funny names such as engrXiv or Frenxiv)? Did people really stopped reading arXiv, like they stopped reading journals, and moved on to Sci-Hub completely? Or the final published versions are substantially different from preprint versions often enough to make Sci-Hub is so important?
  - detaro 5y ago
    > Isn't it the case that most interesting new articles are available on ArXiv No, that's not the case outside a few subfields.

by wtmt 5y ago

jacobolus 5y ago

> getting new papers on to Sci-Hub and it becoming a little bit less relevant over time Sci-Hub is just as relevant as ever. What has happened is that paywalled papers published in 2021 are losing a substantial proportion of their readers and potential citations, and their future impact will be depressed compared to papers from previous years. Even when Sci-Hub starts adding papers again, there may be a significant permanent effect. Unestablished researchers publishing important early-career papers in paywalled journals are getting harmed.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
> Unestablished researchers publishing important early-career papers in paywalled journals are getting harmed. I'm always amazed at the lack of will to change what everyone agrees is a problem.
- Beldin 5y ago
  It has little to do with will, and much more with building a scientific career. Unless you meant that the way academia is structured is the problem here. Because it is and it leads to these excesses. Publishing, itself an acknowledged problem, is being addressed. But slowly, very slowly. Because the incentives in academia do not point to risk taking.
- slx26 5y ago
  It's always lack and coordination and power, not lack of will. There might be around a thousand scientists in the world that are relevant enough to be able to contact other big names and try to get the whole scientific community on board, not only with a massive effort to make the problem well known to the general public and try to gather enough attention to it, but also making some specific proposals on how this can be solved, and proposing some rather drastic measures if laws are not changed, like getting scientists to agree to ignore any paper that's not released freely and publicly online, and trying to get the media and everyone else on board. But those big names are usually very busy already, and doing useful things. Not more useful than this, but translating from will to coordination is one of the biggest problems preventing humanity from making the world a better place. Some essays like "meditations on moloch" have discussed this problem in more detail if you are interested, but the key idea is that existing power dynamics and the interests and willingness to cheat or be "cleverer" of a minority can deeply compromise the game for everyone else, moving the individual "rational" decision (low risk) very far away from the collective optimal.
IlliOnato 5y ago
I am curious about this. Isn't it the case that most interesting new articles are available on ArXiv or one of the newer preprint repositories that seem now to pop up every day (often with funny names such as engrXiv or Frenxiv)? Did people really stopped reading arXiv, like they stopped reading journals, and moved on to Sci-Hub completely? Or the final published versions are substantially different from preprint versions often enough to make Sci-Hub is so important?
- detaro 5y ago
  > Isn't it the case that most interesting new articles are available on ArXiv No, that's not the case outside a few subfields.