8 ms·

I don't think scihub is the future. OpenAccess is the future. I know that in the UK you basically have to post your accepted papers in publicly accessible repos

I don't think scihub is the future. OpenAccess is the future. I know that in the UK you basically have to post your accepted papers in publicly accessible repositories if you want your papers to count for the Research Excellent Framework exercise (which basically compares Universities every 5 years). I know many grants now have openaccess requirements. Plus in the field like physics, basically everyone posts the papers to arxiv anyway.

threatofrain 5y ago
But then SciHub can be the makeshift bridge between now and the open access future.
amelius 5y ago
You are forgetting that a significant chunk of science is still locked up behind paywalls.
logifail 5y ago
> I know that in the UK you basically have to post your accepted papers in publicly accessible repositories (..) How does that _actually_ work, though? Can anyone download the final, published PDF from "publicly accessible repositories"? (Full disclosure: ex scientist with published papers, still no idea how I can legally share _my_ work with anyone who might be interested...)
- crimsoneer 5y ago
  Have a look at this http://lesscrime.info/post/how-to-stop-hiding-your-research/ http://lesscrime.info/post/how-to-stop-hiding-your-research/
- sega_sai 5y ago
  It's not final-final published PDF, because the copy-edited version is owned by the journal, but the accepted versions are available at places like this https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/ https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/ (on top of arxiv )
orzig 5y ago
"In the long run, we're all dead" - John Maynard Keynes You might be right about the far future, but there's still a lot of human flourishing that fails to happen every day until then. Or you could be wrong, and I'd hate to /start/ having this conversation once we realize that.
teddyh 5y ago
> OpenAccess is the future Yes, but the perfect can be the enemy of the good.
esalman 5y ago
One problem with open access is that the cost is prohibitively high. It can range from $2500 in decent peer-reviewed journals to $10,000+ in Nature. Recently we decided not to pay for open-access for one of our articles (as we already had the preprint out). One solution could be that the funding agencies take care of the fees.. because I can't see publishers charging less for it.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Yes, it all has to be paid for some how. Proofreading, copyediting, typesetting, handling the logistics of physical printing and distribution, usually an honorarium for the journal editor, and probably other costs... It all takes resources that have to be paid for somehow. Personally, I think part of the solution would be to have grants that are in some way publicly funded (taxes) to have a portion set aside to pay publishing costs, and require publishing in some way. This would both make open access with well-polished articles more accessible, it would also help solve the issue of negative results rarely being published. Not perfect, not a.silver bullet, but at least an incremental improvement.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dayshine 5y ago
    Perhaps they should just stop wasting money on physical journals and stick to the web format that 99% of people read? Claiming $10k for a bunch of unnecessary work is outrageous. The cost of prestigious journals are the curation and high standard of peer review. Except they don't actually pay their staff for those things...
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Physical print costs are generally a small part of the costs of the other things I mentioned, although the specifics would probably depend on just how popular the was. But you are right: it's still a mostly unnecessary cost these days. And regardless if the other costs, $150 to $700 per year for a journal subscription is rarely justified by the publishing costs the turn articles into more polished and high quality pieces. The financial model for disseminating scientific knowledge is broken, but I did want to acknowledge that there is good and useful work done in-between an author writing up their research and ultimately making it available online.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Open access should be the yesterday. I don't mind if they have to charge $2000 for a paper (but not $5000 to open the paper one year later), but publishers should be forced to open up all existing papers to open access as well . But it is not happening largely because academia is stuck in the chicken-and-egg situation where open access cannot become prestigious while people keep publishing in prestigious journals, and academics have not been able to replace journal prestige with something better
- mattkrause 5y ago
  It....is? Starting in 2013, all US-funded work needs to end up publicly accessible within a year of publication. There are slightly different ways, depending on the funder, but it's the rule. Canada's Tri-Council Agencies have had a similar policy from 2016 onward, ditto EU.... Older papers are tricky though. I'm not sure the government can compel you to make something available.
  - kevinventullo 5y ago
    … all US-funded work needs to end up publicly accessible within a year of publication I hadn’t heard about this, is there a keyword I can use to learn more?
    - mattkrause 5y ago
      Start with the memo written by John P. Holdren, Obama's director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/mic... This is a "meta-policy" of sorts, in that it directs grant-making agencies to form policies of their own. A lot was written about it at the time, most of which includes its title "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research." It came up again in 2020 when OSTP considered revising the rules (e.g., https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/will-trump-white-house-tear-down-journal-paywalls-many-anxiously-await-decision https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/will-trump-white-hou...) Depending on your interests, you could then look at individual agencies' policies. - Here's the NIH policy: https://publicaccess.nih.gov https://publicaccess.nih.gov Search for something in PubMed and there will be a "PMC Free Full Text" icon if it's available from PubMed Central. Some publishers just lower the paywall, in which case it says "free from publisher". - An FAQ for the NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18041/nsf18041.jsp https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18041/nsf18041.jsp - The DoD hosts its own repository called DTIC. Heres' the policy stuff: https://discover.dtic.mil/policy-memoranda/ https://discover.dtic.mil/policy-memoranda/ Open access is the last section. You can search at the top-right for DoD funded research. - Not to be outdone on the acronym front, the DOE has a site called PAGES, which ostensibly stands for Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science: https://www.osti.gov/public-access https://www.osti.gov/public-access - Those are the biggies, but there are a ton of federal agencies covered by the policy. Here's the USDA's plan: https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USDA-Public-Access-Implementation-Plan.pdf https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USDA-Publ...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jmcgough 5y ago
I just don't see things changing in bio sciences because the people who benefit from it don't want it to change, and the people who want it to change (labs without a lot of money, grad students, post-docs) have the least power change it. Scihub is at least levelling the playing field and forcing the conversation to happen.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  I'm surprised to hear that, because from my perspective (neuro), things are changing fairly fast. Bioarxiv is seven years old, and when it started, it was tiny niche service with a few dozen new papers each month. People were skeptical of the contents of preprints and journals were reluctant to accept (or cite) work posted there. Now, it gets thousands of submissions a month and is a de rigueur part of many researchers' (and some journals') workflow. In parallel, governments and funders have put some weight behind open access. An open version needs to be available within a year for all US-funded work from 2013 onward; Canada's similar tri-council policy took effect in 2016(?). It's true that there aren't draconian penalties, but there are some small nudges towards compliance. The NIH wants a PubMed Central ID for any paper you're claiming credit for on a grant. Google Scholar nags about non open-access papers on your profile. Many journals (even initially-closed ones) even handle the whole open access deposition thing for you now. As a result, I find I need the library VPN a lot less these days. On the other hand, I agree that supplanting the publishers is tough. A Cell, Science, or Nature paper still carries a ton of cachet and its associated career impact; ELife isn't quite there yet.
- xtracto 5y ago
  The way I see it, publications like Elsevier and similar should change their business models to be "curators" of public papers. All scientific papers should be submitted to arXiv or a similar public facing service, so that they are available for everyone. Then, Elsevier, Springer, SAGE , et al. should spend their money making ToC / abstract lists of the best of the best papers in the different subjects. That´s the main value of these editorials, they should super specialize in that and leave the distribution/editing to others (they kind of already do, they just want to have control). I may not want to pay ANY money once I am looking for a specific article that I know it exists. But I will pay good money for a "push" type of listing/abstract and maybe analysis of the best articles in certain subjects (its kind of what Feedly does but without any analysis/editorial but just dumb grouping).
einpoklum 5y ago
> I don't think scihub is the future. OpenAccess is the future. It seems you are claiming that the future isn't making all scientific content available, period - but rather only that content whose copyright holders have decided to make available. I whole-heartedly disagree. We must not submit to arbitrary restrictions on the copying of information; and we certainly cannot and should not wait for Elsevier, Springer, IEEE et alia to grace us with access to articles. Also - if "Open Access" means authors have to pay a large wad of money to have their papers published - that's not tolerable either.
tingletech 5y ago
reminds me of the Peter Norvig quip "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yes, free and open access is the way things should be. Sci-Hub just forces the journals to be open access whether they want to or not.
d0mine 5y ago
OpenAccess is the publishers way of implementing "if you can't beat them, lead them:" it is intentionally designed to be ineffective (thousands dollars to publish a single article). Sci-hub existence is the proof by itself that you don't need billions to publish millions of articles.
MrDresden 5y ago
OpenAccess is not a good solution to the issue. While it keeps access open, it costs ludicrous amounts to submit an article (up to 4k $). Not to mention the many journals focusing on OA that keep popping up who are purely profit driven, and care little for quality and standards. With the severe lack of funding in the academic world, OA is not going to be the future, but will potentially skew access and impact towards research with deep pockets (rather than quality). /side note: my spouse is an active publicising academic.
NotSwift 5y ago
I hope that Scihub will continue to exist. There are a lot of important papers that have been published in traditional journals. Scientific work is generally based on previous work. Having access to these papers is also important for future work. In many branches of science it is very common to refer to papers that are many decades old.

threatofrain 5y ago

But then SciHub can be the makeshift bridge between now and the open access future.

amelius 5y ago

You are forgetting that a significant chunk of science is still locked up behind paywalls.

logifail 5y ago

> I know that in the UK you basically have to post your accepted papers in publicly accessible repositories (..) How does that _actually_ work, though? Can anyone download the final, published PDF from "publicly accessible repositories"? (Full disclosure: ex scientist with published papers, still no idea how I can legally share _my_ work with anyone who might be interested...)

crimsoneer 5y ago
Have a look at this http://lesscrime.info/post/how-to-stop-hiding-your-research/ http://lesscrime.info/post/how-to-stop-hiding-your-research/
sega_sai 5y ago
It's not final-final published PDF, because the copy-edited version is owned by the journal, but the accepted versions are available at places like this https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/ https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/ (on top of arxiv )

orzig 5y ago

"In the long run, we're all dead" - John Maynard Keynes You might be right about the far future, but there's still a lot of human flourishing that fails to happen every day until then. Or you could be wrong, and I'd hate to /start/ having this conversation once we realize that.

teddyh 5y ago

> OpenAccess is the future Yes, but the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

esalman 5y ago

One problem with open access is that the cost is prohibitively high. It can range from $2500 in decent peer-reviewed journals to $10,000+ in Nature. Recently we decided not to pay for open-access for one of our articles (as we already had the preprint out). One solution could be that the funding agencies take care of the fees.. because I can't see publishers charging less for it.

ineedasername 5y ago
Yes, it all has to be paid for some how. Proofreading, copyediting, typesetting, handling the logistics of physical printing and distribution, usually an honorarium for the journal editor, and probably other costs... It all takes resources that have to be paid for somehow. Personally, I think part of the solution would be to have grants that are in some way publicly funded (taxes) to have a portion set aside to pay publishing costs, and require publishing in some way. This would both make open access with well-polished articles more accessible, it would also help solve the issue of negative results rarely being published. Not perfect, not a.silver bullet, but at least an incremental improvement.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Dayshine 5y ago
  Perhaps they should just stop wasting money on physical journals and stick to the web format that 99% of people read? Claiming $10k for a bunch of unnecessary work is outrageous. The cost of prestigious journals are the curation and high standard of peer review. Except they don't actually pay their staff for those things...
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Physical print costs are generally a small part of the costs of the other things I mentioned, although the specifics would probably depend on just how popular the was. But you are right: it's still a mostly unnecessary cost these days. And regardless if the other costs, $150 to $700 per year for a journal subscription is rarely justified by the publishing costs the turn articles into more polished and high quality pieces. The financial model for disseminating scientific knowledge is broken, but I did want to acknowledge that there is good and useful work done in-between an author writing up their research and ultimately making it available online.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Open access should be the yesterday. I don't mind if they have to charge $2000 for a paper (but not $5000 to open the paper one year later), but publishers should be forced to open up all existing papers to open access as well . But it is not happening largely because academia is stuck in the chicken-and-egg situation where open access cannot become prestigious while people keep publishing in prestigious journals, and academics have not been able to replace journal prestige with something better

mattkrause 5y ago
It....is? Starting in 2013, all US-funded work needs to end up publicly accessible within a year of publication. There are slightly different ways, depending on the funder, but it's the rule. Canada's Tri-Council Agencies have had a similar policy from 2016 onward, ditto EU.... Older papers are tricky though. I'm not sure the government can compel you to make something available.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  … all US-funded work needs to end up publicly accessible within a year of publication I hadn’t heard about this, is there a keyword I can use to learn more?
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    Start with the memo written by John P. Holdren, Obama's director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/mic... This is a "meta-policy" of sorts, in that it directs grant-making agencies to form policies of their own. A lot was written about it at the time, most of which includes its title "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research." It came up again in 2020 when OSTP considered revising the rules (e.g., https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/will-trump-white-house-tear-down-journal-paywalls-many-anxiously-await-decision https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/will-trump-white-hou...) Depending on your interests, you could then look at individual agencies' policies. - Here's the NIH policy: https://publicaccess.nih.gov https://publicaccess.nih.gov Search for something in PubMed and there will be a "PMC Free Full Text" icon if it's available from PubMed Central. Some publishers just lower the paywall, in which case it says "free from publisher". - An FAQ for the NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18041/nsf18041.jsp https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18041/nsf18041.jsp - The DoD hosts its own repository called DTIC. Heres' the policy stuff: https://discover.dtic.mil/policy-memoranda/ https://discover.dtic.mil/policy-memoranda/ Open access is the last section. You can search at the top-right for DoD funded research. - Not to be outdone on the acronym front, the DOE has a site called PAGES, which ostensibly stands for Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science: https://www.osti.gov/public-access https://www.osti.gov/public-access - Those are the biggies, but there are a ton of federal agencies covered by the policy. Here's the USDA's plan: https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USDA-Public-Access-Implementation-Plan.pdf https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USDA-Publ...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jmcgough 5y ago

I just don't see things changing in bio sciences because the people who benefit from it don't want it to change, and the people who want it to change (labs without a lot of money, grad students, post-docs) have the least power change it. Scihub is at least levelling the playing field and forcing the conversation to happen.

mattkrause 5y ago
I'm surprised to hear that, because from my perspective (neuro), things are changing fairly fast. Bioarxiv is seven years old, and when it started, it was tiny niche service with a few dozen new papers each month. People were skeptical of the contents of preprints and journals were reluctant to accept (or cite) work posted there. Now, it gets thousands of submissions a month and is a de rigueur part of many researchers' (and some journals') workflow. In parallel, governments and funders have put some weight behind open access. An open version needs to be available within a year for all US-funded work from 2013 onward; Canada's similar tri-council policy took effect in 2016(?). It's true that there aren't draconian penalties, but there are some small nudges towards compliance. The NIH wants a PubMed Central ID for any paper you're claiming credit for on a grant. Google Scholar nags about non open-access papers on your profile. Many journals (even initially-closed ones) even handle the whole open access deposition thing for you now. As a result, I find I need the library VPN a lot less these days. On the other hand, I agree that supplanting the publishers is tough. A Cell, Science, or Nature paper still carries a ton of cachet and its associated career impact; ELife isn't quite there yet.
xtracto 5y ago
The way I see it, publications like Elsevier and similar should change their business models to be "curators" of public papers. All scientific papers should be submitted to arXiv or a similar public facing service, so that they are available for everyone. Then, Elsevier, Springer, SAGE , et al. should spend their money making ToC / abstract lists of the best of the best papers in the different subjects. That´s the main value of these editorials, they should super specialize in that and leave the distribution/editing to others (they kind of already do, they just want to have control). I may not want to pay ANY money once I am looking for a specific article that I know it exists. But I will pay good money for a "push" type of listing/abstract and maybe analysis of the best articles in certain subjects (its kind of what Feedly does but without any analysis/editorial but just dumb grouping).

einpoklum 5y ago

> I don't think scihub is the future. OpenAccess is the future. It seems you are claiming that the future isn't making all scientific content available, period - but rather only that content whose copyright holders have decided to make available. I whole-heartedly disagree. We must not submit to arbitrary restrictions on the copying of information; and we certainly cannot and should not wait for Elsevier, Springer, IEEE et alia to grace us with access to articles. Also - if "Open Access" means authors have to pay a large wad of money to have their papers published - that's not tolerable either.

tingletech 5y ago

reminds me of the Peter Norvig quip "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Yes, free and open access is the way things should be. Sci-Hub just forces the journals to be open access whether they want to or not.

d0mine 5y ago

OpenAccess is the publishers way of implementing "if you can't beat them, lead them:" it is intentionally designed to be ineffective (thousands dollars to publish a single article). Sci-hub existence is the proof by itself that you don't need billions to publish millions of articles.

MrDresden 5y ago

OpenAccess is not a good solution to the issue. While it keeps access open, it costs ludicrous amounts to submit an article (up to 4k $). Not to mention the many journals focusing on OA that keep popping up who are purely profit driven, and care little for quality and standards. With the severe lack of funding in the academic world, OA is not going to be the future, but will potentially skew access and impact towards research with deep pockets (rather than quality). /side note: my spouse is an active publicising academic.

NotSwift 5y ago

I hope that Scihub will continue to exist. There are a lot of important papers that have been published in traditional journals. Scientific work is generally based on previous work. Having access to these papers is also important for future work. In many branches of science it is very common to refer to papers that are many decades old.