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How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub
- uniqueid 5y agoI have a superstition: I don't see a robust future for Sci-Hub, Internet Archive or Wikipedia. The internet relentlessly turns everything into worthless trash, so Sci-Hub will die, Internet Archive will wind up with Doritos ads and a paywall, and Wikipedia will focus on sponsored articles and deprecate, in one way or another, articles that aren't commercial.
- worik 5y agoWhat is your time frame for this? Internet Archive has been around since 1996 and Wikipedia 2001 (ish)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- uniqueid 5y agoI don't have a time frame for it. I just know that 'this is useful' historically doesn't save an online service (Napster, Ebay, Amazon, Reddit, Twitter, Google Search, etc) from disappearing or turning lousy. The fact that millions of people love Internet Archive and Wikipedia means there's money to made by ruining them.
- mnd999 5y agoAs a native English speaker, I take “one-woman show” to mean it’s just her.
- jannes 5y agoProbably she didn't say "show" in russian though. Some things are getting lost in translation here. She laments that The Chronicle doesn't credit her as doing actual work by describing what she does as a "show" instead. (implying that a male is doing the actual devops work behind the scenes)
- tallanvor 5y agoExcept that by saying that it's a "one woman show", they are giving her all the credit for the site, and that's what a fluent English speaker will understand. It's not The Chronicle's fault that she misinterpreted the article.
- azernik 5y agoTranslators move things into idiom all the time; "one-man show" (gender is easily swappable) is an idiom that comes from stage, refers to single-actor plays where one person plays multiple roles, and comes with connotations of skill versatility and industriousness.
- pwinnski 5y agoI read her lament, but it seems to be based on a lack of understanding of the idiom. In English, the phrase "one-person show" implies nothing other than the efforts of a single person to produce something great. There is no denigration nor implication of anything else in the idiom.
- kzrdude 5y agoYes, it sounds like she is misunderstanding it in this case. "One-woman show" doesn't imply that it's just a facade, fake project (which she seems to take from "show"), it's just an idiom to say it's something that one person does (not a team).
- phire 5y agoAnd usually has positive connotations. Most of the time you use the "one-woman show" idiom is when you are impressed that one person does this by themselves.
- worik 5y agoAnd there is the sexist assumption that there must be a bloke some place doing the actual work.
- pwinnski 5y agoThere is not, though. No native speaker of English, which the newspaper of record in Houston, Texas, might be forgiven for assuming make up its primary readership, would ever assume that anything described as a "one-man show" must have a woman hidden away doing all of the behind-the-scenes work. The idiom means "the work of a single person," and that's it. Nothing else.
- selimthegrim 5y agoThis is the Chronicle of Higher Education, not the Houston Chronicle
- pwinnski 5y agoDoh! Thanks, I missed that.
- amaajemyfren 5y agoIs there a sort of single sign on reasonably priced service that aggregates the many publishers of government funded papers in one place?
- jannes 5y agoNo
- amaajemyfren 5y agoIf that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.
- j-pb 5y agoThis completely misses the point. Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper publication is done by people paid by universities and in turn by taxpayer money. The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even not that), they pay the person that does the final formatting (which is often already done by the author). So it often boils down to having a program add the publishers copyright notice. So you pay 35$ per download of a 2mb file, where all the publisher did is host said 2mb file. Does that seem like a fair price? So universities pay twice. The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses. That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.
- kwyjibo12345 5y agoThe common life cycle of a paper is as follows: 1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax money pays 2. Academics review papers -> university/tax money pays 3. Academics organize and attend conferences -> university/tax money pays 4. University buys published paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays So university/tax money pays for writing the paper, quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive subscription. For a rational environment like science this model is simply insane.
- kwyjibo12345 5y agoHaving worked as a researcher all my life in academia and the industry, I can only support Sci-Hub. Publishing as it works currently is an incredibly time consuming and expensive process funneling tremendous amounts of tax money into the pocḱets of publishers. To some extent the whole situation reminds me of the video and music content piracy era in the early 2000s. I hope there will be an equivalent of Apple Music/Spotify/Netflix for scientific papers in the near future.
- Tepix 5y agoThese papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer reviewed for free should be made freely available legally.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer reviewed for free should be made freely available legally There is a legitimate argument in the value added of curating research into journals. The publishers don’t do this. But simply eliminating that curation mode is unlikely to be feasible.
- Tepix 5y agoSure, I'm not saying these journals should be abolished, i merely want the papers to be available for free. You might still want to browse the journal to see what is hot right now.
- rjmunro 5y agoI hear they generally are "freely" available, just email the authors and ask.
- subroutine 5y agoHaving to wait for an author to email you a copy isn't a viable solution. Even getting authors to post a free copy, which is NIH mandate is often overlooked... https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
- 31758329051230 5y agoBoth of these complaints are very superficial given how positive the article actually is.
- dash2 5y agoYeah, it's easy to get jumpy when you are written about in public. The bigger picture is that she is absolutely doing God's work. As an academic: screw Elsevier. Those guys, once at the forefront of the printing revolution, are now greedy rent-extracting parasites holding back another communications revolution. The sooner they go out of business, the happier I will be.
- lovasoa 5y agoThe original article presents her in a very bright light, as a smart and brave woman who is engaged in a legal battle against large greedy corporations. And I find the photo quite cool. I think she is just overly susceptible, and maybe a little bit paranoid (which is understandable for a person with enemies as powerful as hers). This reminds me of the time when a russian entomologist named a new wasp species he discovered after her in her honor, and she took offense because the wasp was a parasite species, and blocked sci-hub in Russia for a few days in retaliation ! edit: sci-hub was blocked only a few days, not months, my memory failed me.
- nix23 5y ago>and she took offense because the wasp was a parasite species, and blocked sci-hub in Russia for several months in retaliation Sounds like shes the wrong person in charge of sci-hub. Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is offended is probably even worse...that's the mindset of dictators no? And Russia is probably her only protection not being assange'd already.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoFeel free to run your own Sci-Hub, then. It's not like this is a massively collaborative project that she's the executive decision-maker of; it's largely just her.
- nix23 5y agoDon't you see a problem here? >>Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is offended >it's largely just her Yeah and that's the problem, with all dictatorships. >It's not like this is a massively collaborative project Who then uploads the content? Her alone?
- pessimizer 5y agoShe's the one delivering that access. And if you want to define sole decisionmaking power as dictatorship, I'm the dictator of the cookies I baked yesterday, too. You're free to provide access to the papers yourself.
- radmuzom 5y agoI would consider her as one of my heroes. Having said that, probably she has not faced a genuinely strong attempt at malignment yet, like some people tried to pull off on Stallman (“he is a defender of Epstein and child rapists”) few months ago. I hope she has a support system to fall back on when that happens.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoThat's what happened a few years ago; the kerfuffle a few months ago was much more justified. And I don't really see how that's relevant here, anyway.
- radmuzom 5y agoI was just trying to point out that if she considers this as trying to "malign her", then she will have to prepare for much worse attacks later for doing the right thing.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoWhy? Richard Stallman wasn't attacked for doing the right thing. The first time you're thinking of, he was attacked over a misunderstanding when he wrote about a controversial topic, and people's general resentment of him bubbled over and made it a big thing. The second (more recent) one, he was attacked over unresigning, and because he pushed a lot of people away from Free Software. Alexandra Elbakyan has, to my knowledge, not really pushed people away from open access science. She hasn't gone to conferences and made pejorative “jokes” about men, or deathists, or eaten her toe jam on stage. Why would people attack her?
- radmuzom 5y ago> "Richard Stallman wasn't attacked for doing the right thing." He absolutely was. For defending a dead person who was being accused of sexual assault. Most people won't even take the risk of tarnishing their own reputation given that the accused is dead.
- rauhallinen 5y agoSo no new articles have been uploaded this year. While I have relatively good access options through my university, roughly half of the publications appearing in my Google Scholar alerts are unaccessible. As they are also in fields were use of preprint services isn't common, it really interferes with me being up to date with ongoing research. As the use of sci-hub is so common, I wonder about the wider implications of the newest articles being inaccessible. Could bibliometric methods be used to quantify this? Missed citations? Less citations for articles published in more obscure journals? Interesting that no new solutions have come out yet. I'm seeing people getting back to use #ICanHazPDF - not the best way to conduct research when an article is often just a gateway to more finding more relevant articles to read.
- inciampati 5y agoThis is purportedly related to a lawsuit in India. The thought is that Alexandra is intentionally being as cooperative as possible because there is a possibility of a legal victory in that jurisdiction. The court had asked her to cease adding new material. She has shown us the way. We can always recreate sci-hub, should the current system cease to function. We even know what kind of budget it takes to set up and operate for a decade: $100k!
- Phenomenit 5y agoWasn't it $100k in total from the beginning of the project in 2011? That's how I perceived it anyways.
- The_rationalist 5y agoI never see someone speak about it so I'm gonna say it, sci-hub is very incomplete both for old papers from other countries and for recent papers from occidental countries.
- ElDji 5y agoThe question the HN community should ask itself is: What can be done to improve the sustainability of the scihub project, for example to make it more decentralised?
- andyxor 5y agoThere is a rescue mission to save Scihub, you can help by seeding the torrents or contributing to related open source efforts https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_mission_for_scihub_and_open_science_we_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_... there are some discussions on using IPFS for decentralized storage and indexing of existing 85M Scihub papers http://freeread.org/ipfs/ http://freeread.org/ipfs/
- eplanit 5y agoShe started off with a decent explanation and defense of her work... but then fell off completely with the complaints about the photo and the worries about getting 100% credit. I don't know if it's due to the pressures she faces, or if that was her personality to begin with. Was gaining fame part of her goal?
- ipaddr 5y agoWait until they invalid any paper that doesn't have an author subscribed whatever journals they cite at the time of publication. That will be coming..
- qwertox 5y agoWe're kind of lucky for having so many precise SDK-, Framework- and Language documentations freely available. Just imagine how painful it would be if you'd need some kind of subscription from some centralized companies only to find out which methods a class has and what exactly they do. Does it feel like this to not have access to papers in the scientific community? I can't tell, because I don't read papers. All I need to know is available either freely on the web or in books. I mean, just look at the level of detail in this PDF: https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/esp32_technical_reference_manual_en.pdf https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...
- ineedasername 5y agoDoes it feel like this to not have access to papers in the scientific community? Yes, it's very frustrating read a paper and see a citation to something that would be useful only to see that your library doesn't subscribe to it. At least if it's a book you can get it by inter-library loan, so that's a little better than journal articles.
- dqpb 5y agoAlexandra Elbakyan deserves a Nobel Prize.
- mcguire 5y ago"'She said that while she gets some help, Sci-Hub remains pretty much a one-woman show (it’s “mainly me,” she said)' -- The Chronicle of Higher Education "So they lie to their readers that Sci-Hub run by a woman is some kind of not a real thing but a ‘show’,..." I'd like to point out that "...a one-woman show" is an expression in American English that does not carry any extra connotations of "show" such as fictional or a falsehood.