8 ms·

I used to donate to a lot of "tech/free/open-source" related and free speech non-profits to the amount of about $5,000 per year but this past year I ended up pa

by Jerry2 5y ago

I used to donate to a lot of "tech/free/open-source" related and free speech non-profits to the amount of about $5,000 per year but this past year I ended up paring down my choices and only donating to Archive.org, Archive.is, FSF and Sci-Hub. I still feel like Sci-Hub is the least robust of the orgs and I feel like they need most of the help. I also use it at least once a day. My only child, a 5 year old girl, has a fairly rare degenerative disease and I've been reading the latest research on it and have been using this knowledge to inform her physician about possible treatments. She ended up in a promising drug study because I kept on top of this field and ended up talking to researchers about it. In a large part, this is thanks to Sci-Hub. Nothing in this world is free. If you depend on some "free" or non-profit service that you use often, consider donating to them. You'd be amazed how far even $10 goes when put in good hands.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> Nothing in this world is free. Apparently academic peer review is. I've been told they can't be paid for that work because of conflict of interest concerns. The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? Just boycott these copyright monopolists and it will be the end of them. There's really no reason for these paid journals to even exist anymore.
- esalman 5y ago
  Not exactly. A good journal needs a good editor. The role that the editors play (while putting their reputation on the line) is really poorly understood and under-appreciated by most within and outside academia.
  - gnulinux 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on this role and why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease? (Genuine question, I don't know editor's role in academia at all)
    - esalman 5y ago
      Editors basically make sure that the good research get published and the bad ones are thrown out. They invite submissions, do basic QA, find potential reviewers and send the submissions out for review, make final accept/reject or revision decision. Only after that the publishers do the actual work, e.g. copy-editing, proofing, printing and distribution of the research. Top journals usually have distinguished professors from reputed institutions in the editorial panel. That's why we can rely (somewhat) on peer-reviewed articles in those journals instead of random blog posts or arXiv submissions. > why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease? Well I can only imagine the pain and suffering such person and their loved ones would go through, but I guess it will give them some glimmer of hope and respite. Most people lack the expertise to understand and follow cutting edge research, so someone in a position to understand the research and simultaneously benefit from it personally should have access to the said research by all means.
  - justinpombrio 5y ago
    Many (most?) academic journals don't do a significant amount of editing. They leave that to the author and reviewers.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Article selection itself is editing, as is setting up the processes for review and acceptance. That said, I think academic publishing is a criminal industry and Alexandra Elbakyan a modern day superhero.
      - esalman 5y ago
        Fully agree. We were having a heated discussion last night about this in my grad student circle. In the end we felt pressure must be put on the big players in the industry, such as Elsevier, to move away from the profit maximization model. It will take a lot of hard work and sacrifice from many in the academia to do so, not just because Elsevier is so big and influential, but also the fact that the stakeholders like the researchers- professors, post-docs and grad students are such a diverse community with very wide range of purpose and motivations. One avenue could be through the authorities in Netherlands and EU where they are based. The other solution would be to remove some anonymity from the peer review process- make the reviewer comments public at the least, to somewhat improve the quality of science that is being generated these days.
        throwaway984393 5y ago
        If you focus solely on the publishers, your impact will be minimal; they can ignore you. But publishers get all their money from institutions. So you could focus your energy on forcing institutions to stop using the publishers. But you will find that institutions don't want the model to change. They want to pay less money for publishing, but they don't actually want to lose the paid journals, because their whole research funding model would collapse, as it's built entirely around the reputation of the journal. Either institutions have to completely re-invent how they fund and organize research, or someone has to get paid to do the actual work of maintaining journals. The publishers' profit margins are one thing; anyone could start a competing publisher tomorrow and take a fraction of the profit. But people are not asking for reduced profit, they're asking for abolishment of paid publishing, which is like saying, let's abolish the entire system of scientific research.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    A good editor can make or break a journal. Some of the ones who are the best at what they do are amazing.
- amirkdv 5y ago
  Yup. They shouldn't exist. It's an outrage that they do. They don't pay the reviewers. They charge the authors (who pay the ransom typically from taxpayer funded research grants), and they charge the readers, who are either the public or said academics again. But the reason they do exist is that they have the monopoly on issuing the only acceptable currency that dictates the life and career of academics: publishing their work in "high impact" publications.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    Not all journals charge the authors. Indeed, one of my annoyances is that the open access movement has moved the burden of paying for journals from institutions to individual PIs, which hurts new PIs worse.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  You mean you want journals to exist only for peer review, but that's not their actual function today. They actually exist today to prop up an academic research industry driven by cash and reputation. If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be a breakdown in institutional funding, there would be chaos in editing, publishing, discovering and vetting information, and it would actually be harder to access information. Sci-Hub distributes information that paid journals have already done the work to curate. Once paid journals go away, Sci-Hub will end up like GitHub: a million random repositories maintained by random people with no index. Only there's a whole host of new problems that scientific research needs to solve that is more complicated than some poorly written lines of code. The stakes are different; the errors lead to worse outcomes, rigor is much more important, and finding relevant information in the vast array of available research is much more important. I'm not saying publishing today is great. It very much isn't. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution. It's like saying, this government is corrupt, let's throw out the government! Look how well that works for countries that don't have a new government prepared to replace the old one.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > They actually exist today to prop up an academic research industry driven by cash and reputation. Just yet another problem with academia that needs to be solved. This system leads to all sorts of academic dishonesty such as reviewing rings. It's at least partially responsible for the sheer number of bad papers being published today. Disrupting it is a good thing. > If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be a breakdown in institutional funding, there would be chaos in editing, publishing, discovering and vetting information, and it would actually be harder to access information. It's okay. Just let the whole thing break down. Eventually it'll sort itself out. > Sci-Hub distributes information that paid journals have already done the work to curate. This curation is just gatekeeping done by peer reviewers. All they need to do is set up a blog and start gatekeeping it. Good papers get posted there, bad papers don't. I really don't see why it has to be any more complicated than that. > But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution. It's certainly better than sitting around waiting for a multi-billion dollar industry of copyright monopolists to get even richer and powerful.
- mjn 5y ago
  > The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? It's happening slowly in some fields. Well, not quite independently, but in loose professional associations. It requires pretty coordinated action and still has a chance of failing though. One early successful case is that almost the entire editorial board of the Springer journal Machine Learning resigned in 2001, and threw their weight behind a community-run, non-profit, open-access alternative, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), which is now considered by most people to be at least as prestigious as the Springer journal. Open letter with their rationale from the time: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/statement.html http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/statement.html
- cfn 5y ago
  Because reviewing is difficult, time consuming and, if you want anonimity of the reviewer, needs a third party to select the reviewer and coordinate the operation. I am not sure if most people are aware but peer reviewing is not paid. The journals that charge for access to the papers only do coordination and publishing (which is vanishngly cheap these days). All the work is done by the authors and the reviewers and they get nil from that pile of money. Peer review worked (mostly) when most researchers had tenure in an university or research institution and volume was low. They were able to manage their time and allocate the necessary to that function. The situation now is that journals spray and pray review requests' emails to anyone who has ever published a paper regardless of their position or even if their work is related. This is a consequence of the volume and the mess that research positions are where the focus is on grants, money and power with science a distant fourth.
  - danuker 5y ago
    > anonymity of the reviewer I review my colleague's code every week. Yet it seems they are not out to get me and actually thank me for the feedback. Why doesn't the same apply to scientific research? Why do reviewers want to be anonymous?
    - endominus 5y ago
      Different incentives, I assume? Otherwise, it would be easier to form insular groups promoting questionable science, especially in the softer sciences. Tit-for-tat reviewing, promotion through citations, etc. While programmers (in companies with well-run engineering environments) are incentivized and rewarded for reviewing code, a group of them can't just form a cabal that mindlessly "approves" of each other's shitcode for long without someone finding out none of it actually works. The same is not true of a lot of science. See; 5-HTTLPR [0] Just a guess; I'm not plugged into the environment. [0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... is a good run-down of the controversy. TL;DR, a seratonin transporter gene was suspected to be involved in basically every mental issue and hundreds of papers were published in agreement. All of them are basically bullshit.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >So why can't reviewers just start working independently? because trust and reputation in institutions is stronger than trust in individuals (which is ephemeral) and fields like scientific research consist of communities who only really can function under high levels of trust. Journals, just like physical universities exist because they can accumulate that degree of trust and it's why top researchers go to Oxford and not to Khan Academy. It's also why corporations exist and we're not all freelancers on the internet.
- mrslave 5y ago
  I know editors of journals and they all get paid. However it is recognized that it is low and not expected to seriously complement their income. Think in the order of $2-5K p.a. All of whom I know have permanent university roles. It is considered prestigious for the editor/reviewer in the sense of service to their intellectual community, and to their resume; and their university to have their brand in positions of influence. Most tend to leave after only a few years and this is considered normal. The role of reviewer/editor is not significant enough to earn promotions - this must come from their research & teaching. They are required to declare any conflicts of interest for any papers under their review and they are simply passed to another editor. While the person who reviews your paper is usually unknown (through the review software/pool of reviewers) there's really little incentive to cheat on this as there exists sufficient high quality readers who can call out obvious bias/unusually low quality publications for the tier of journal. The most burdensome class of problem is the mass of papers submitted of insufficient quality for publication in the journal. These are quickly rejected but the volume is so high, and rejected authors often attempt to challenge. Sometimes they are rude. (I can't estimate the size of this from memory, sorry.) The upside is fortunately these don't require deep/secondary review.
ummonk 5y ago
If there were a legal subscription service with the convenience and breadth of Sci-Hub I’d pay for it. It’s an incredibly useful tool when researching a topic whose articles are published across a multitude of paywalled journals that aren’t accessible on JSTOR (using its 100 free articles).
spac 5y ago
Jerry, I am so very sorry to hear about your daughter. My toddler son is affected by a very rare cancer, and while I can't put myself in your shoes, I know that feeling, that it's upon you to go through all the biomedical knowledge to figure it out. The company I co-founded, Epistemic AI [0], was built to accelerate biomedical research especially in rare diseases and cancers. I would love to connect and give you free access to our platform, and to extend it to any researcher working on your daughter's condition. Feel free to shoot me an email at info at epistemic.ai should you find that useful. In the meantime, best of luck to you and your family. [0] https://www.epistemic.ai https://www.epistemic.ai
agumonkey 5y ago
Have you had any troubles donating to scihub ? (From bank refusing wiring to warnings from officials) Best of luck with your child.
- sneak 5y ago
  Donate with bitcoin so that your payments can't be interfered with.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    a nice use of btc
sleepingsoul 5y ago
Hi Jerry -- thank you for sharing your story, and for your note about donating to those organizations; they are all doing incredibly important work. I know it isn't fun being advertised to, but I really believe that what we're building at scite.ai will be directly useful for you in staying on top of the research in that field. I wasn't sure how best to reach you, but if you drop me a note at the email in my profile, I would be happy to give you access to our platform (and run through how you can use it to stay up to date). Ashish

by Jerry2 5y ago

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> Nothing in this world is free. Apparently academic peer review is. I've been told they can't be paid for that work because of conflict of interest concerns. The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? Just boycott these copyright monopolists and it will be the end of them. There's really no reason for these paid journals to even exist anymore.

esalman 5y ago
Not exactly. A good journal needs a good editor. The role that the editors play (while putting their reputation on the line) is really poorly understood and under-appreciated by most within and outside academia.
- gnulinux 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on this role and why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease? (Genuine question, I don't know editor's role in academia at all)
  - esalman 5y ago
    Editors basically make sure that the good research get published and the bad ones are thrown out. They invite submissions, do basic QA, find potential reviewers and send the submissions out for review, make final accept/reject or revision decision. Only after that the publishers do the actual work, e.g. copy-editing, proofing, printing and distribution of the research. Top journals usually have distinguished professors from reputed institutions in the editorial panel. That's why we can rely (somewhat) on peer-reviewed articles in those journals instead of random blog posts or arXiv submissions. > why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease? Well I can only imagine the pain and suffering such person and their loved ones would go through, but I guess it will give them some glimmer of hope and respite. Most people lack the expertise to understand and follow cutting edge research, so someone in a position to understand the research and simultaneously benefit from it personally should have access to the said research by all means.
- justinpombrio 5y ago
  Many (most?) academic journals don't do a significant amount of editing. They leave that to the author and reviewers.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Article selection itself is editing, as is setting up the processes for review and acceptance. That said, I think academic publishing is a criminal industry and Alexandra Elbakyan a modern day superhero.
    - esalman 5y ago
      Fully agree. We were having a heated discussion last night about this in my grad student circle. In the end we felt pressure must be put on the big players in the industry, such as Elsevier, to move away from the profit maximization model. It will take a lot of hard work and sacrifice from many in the academia to do so, not just because Elsevier is so big and influential, but also the fact that the stakeholders like the researchers- professors, post-docs and grad students are such a diverse community with very wide range of purpose and motivations. One avenue could be through the authorities in Netherlands and EU where they are based. The other solution would be to remove some anonymity from the peer review process- make the reviewer comments public at the least, to somewhat improve the quality of science that is being generated these days.
      - throwaway984393 5y ago
        If you focus solely on the publishers, your impact will be minimal; they can ignore you. But publishers get all their money from institutions. So you could focus your energy on forcing institutions to stop using the publishers. But you will find that institutions don't want the model to change. They want to pay less money for publishing, but they don't actually want to lose the paid journals, because their whole research funding model would collapse, as it's built entirely around the reputation of the journal. Either institutions have to completely re-invent how they fund and organize research, or someone has to get paid to do the actual work of maintaining journals. The publishers' profit margins are one thing; anyone could start a competing publisher tomorrow and take a fraction of the profit. But people are not asking for reduced profit, they're asking for abolishment of paid publishing, which is like saying, let's abolish the entire system of scientific research.
- Fomite 5y ago
  A good editor can make or break a journal. Some of the ones who are the best at what they do are amazing.
amirkdv 5y ago
Yup. They shouldn't exist. It's an outrage that they do. They don't pay the reviewers. They charge the authors (who pay the ransom typically from taxpayer funded research grants), and they charge the readers, who are either the public or said academics again. But the reason they do exist is that they have the monopoly on issuing the only acceptable currency that dictates the life and career of academics: publishing their work in "high impact" publications.
- Fomite 5y ago
  Not all journals charge the authors. Indeed, one of my annoyances is that the open access movement has moved the burden of paying for journals from institutions to individual PIs, which hurts new PIs worse.
throwaway984393 5y ago
You mean you want journals to exist only for peer review, but that's not their actual function today. They actually exist today to prop up an academic research industry driven by cash and reputation. If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be a breakdown in institutional funding, there would be chaos in editing, publishing, discovering and vetting information, and it would actually be harder to access information. Sci-Hub distributes information that paid journals have already done the work to curate. Once paid journals go away, Sci-Hub will end up like GitHub: a million random repositories maintained by random people with no index. Only there's a whole host of new problems that scientific research needs to solve that is more complicated than some poorly written lines of code. The stakes are different; the errors lead to worse outcomes, rigor is much more important, and finding relevant information in the vast array of available research is much more important. I'm not saying publishing today is great. It very much isn't. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution. It's like saying, this government is corrupt, let's throw out the government! Look how well that works for countries that don't have a new government prepared to replace the old one.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > They actually exist today to prop up an academic research industry driven by cash and reputation. Just yet another problem with academia that needs to be solved. This system leads to all sorts of academic dishonesty such as reviewing rings. It's at least partially responsible for the sheer number of bad papers being published today. Disrupting it is a good thing. > If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be a breakdown in institutional funding, there would be chaos in editing, publishing, discovering and vetting information, and it would actually be harder to access information. It's okay. Just let the whole thing break down. Eventually it'll sort itself out. > Sci-Hub distributes information that paid journals have already done the work to curate. This curation is just gatekeeping done by peer reviewers. All they need to do is set up a blog and start gatekeeping it. Good papers get posted there, bad papers don't. I really don't see why it has to be any more complicated than that. > But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution. It's certainly better than sitting around waiting for a multi-billion dollar industry of copyright monopolists to get even richer and powerful.
mjn 5y ago
> The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? It's happening slowly in some fields. Well, not quite independently, but in loose professional associations. It requires pretty coordinated action and still has a chance of failing though. One early successful case is that almost the entire editorial board of the Springer journal Machine Learning resigned in 2001, and threw their weight behind a community-run, non-profit, open-access alternative, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), which is now considered by most people to be at least as prestigious as the Springer journal. Open letter with their rationale from the time: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/statement.html http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/statement.html
cfn 5y ago
Because reviewing is difficult, time consuming and, if you want anonimity of the reviewer, needs a third party to select the reviewer and coordinate the operation. I am not sure if most people are aware but peer reviewing is not paid. The journals that charge for access to the papers only do coordination and publishing (which is vanishngly cheap these days). All the work is done by the authors and the reviewers and they get nil from that pile of money. Peer review worked (mostly) when most researchers had tenure in an university or research institution and volume was low. They were able to manage their time and allocate the necessary to that function. The situation now is that journals spray and pray review requests' emails to anyone who has ever published a paper regardless of their position or even if their work is related. This is a consequence of the volume and the mess that research positions are where the focus is on grants, money and power with science a distant fourth.
- danuker 5y ago
  > anonymity of the reviewer I review my colleague's code every week. Yet it seems they are not out to get me and actually thank me for the feedback. Why doesn't the same apply to scientific research? Why do reviewers want to be anonymous?
  - endominus 5y ago
    Different incentives, I assume? Otherwise, it would be easier to form insular groups promoting questionable science, especially in the softer sciences. Tit-for-tat reviewing, promotion through citations, etc. While programmers (in companies with well-run engineering environments) are incentivized and rewarded for reviewing code, a group of them can't just form a cabal that mindlessly "approves" of each other's shitcode for long without someone finding out none of it actually works. The same is not true of a lot of science. See; 5-HTTLPR [0] Just a guess; I'm not plugged into the environment. [0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... is a good run-down of the controversy. TL;DR, a seratonin transporter gene was suspected to be involved in basically every mental issue and hundreds of papers were published in agreement. All of them are basically bullshit.
Barrin92 5y ago
>So why can't reviewers just start working independently? because trust and reputation in institutions is stronger than trust in individuals (which is ephemeral) and fields like scientific research consist of communities who only really can function under high levels of trust. Journals, just like physical universities exist because they can accumulate that degree of trust and it's why top researchers go to Oxford and not to Khan Academy. It's also why corporations exist and we're not all freelancers on the internet.
mrslave 5y ago
I know editors of journals and they all get paid. However it is recognized that it is low and not expected to seriously complement their income. Think in the order of $2-5K p.a. All of whom I know have permanent university roles. It is considered prestigious for the editor/reviewer in the sense of service to their intellectual community, and to their resume; and their university to have their brand in positions of influence. Most tend to leave after only a few years and this is considered normal. The role of reviewer/editor is not significant enough to earn promotions - this must come from their research & teaching. They are required to declare any conflicts of interest for any papers under their review and they are simply passed to another editor. While the person who reviews your paper is usually unknown (through the review software/pool of reviewers) there's really little incentive to cheat on this as there exists sufficient high quality readers who can call out obvious bias/unusually low quality publications for the tier of journal. The most burdensome class of problem is the mass of papers submitted of insufficient quality for publication in the journal. These are quickly rejected but the volume is so high, and rejected authors often attempt to challenge. Sometimes they are rude. (I can't estimate the size of this from memory, sorry.) The upside is fortunately these don't require deep/secondary review.

ummonk 5y ago

If there were a legal subscription service with the convenience and breadth of Sci-Hub I’d pay for it. It’s an incredibly useful tool when researching a topic whose articles are published across a multitude of paywalled journals that aren’t accessible on JSTOR (using its 100 free articles).

spac 5y ago

Jerry, I am so very sorry to hear about your daughter. My toddler son is affected by a very rare cancer, and while I can't put myself in your shoes, I know that feeling, that it's upon you to go through all the biomedical knowledge to figure it out. The company I co-founded, Epistemic AI [0], was built to accelerate biomedical research especially in rare diseases and cancers. I would love to connect and give you free access to our platform, and to extend it to any researcher working on your daughter's condition. Feel free to shoot me an email at info at epistemic.ai should you find that useful. In the meantime, best of luck to you and your family. [0] https://www.epistemic.ai https://www.epistemic.ai

agumonkey 5y ago

Have you had any troubles donating to scihub ? (From bank refusing wiring to warnings from officials) Best of luck with your child.

sneak 5y ago
Donate with bitcoin so that your payments can't be interfered with.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  a nice use of btc

sleepingsoul 5y ago

Hi Jerry -- thank you for sharing your story, and for your note about donating to those organizations; they are all doing incredibly important work. I know it isn't fun being advertised to, but I really believe that what we're building at scite.ai will be directly useful for you in staying on top of the research in that field. I wasn't sure how best to reach you, but if you drop me a note at the email in my profile, I would be happy to give you access to our platform (and run through how you can use it to stay up to date). Ashish