13 ms·

Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone (2016)

437 points by azalemeth 5y ago

qsort 5y ago
Behind a paywall. The irony is delightful.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  Obligatory link: https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
- colonwqbang 5y ago
  Science publishers are tone deaf beyond belief.
beckman466 5y ago
Elsevier and other capitalist firms that lock up papers are the real pirates in the first place: "Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting." Source: professor Jakob Rigi, https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146 https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146
- hirako2000 5y ago
  Beautiful. I like the mention of the economic classes at play there. It is convenient for those who can afford all the knowledge they can swallow to find it illegitimate for those who can't afford any quality bites, to get their hands on some.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  The way they compare this literal non-crime to high seas piracy pisses me off to no end. I hate how entrenched this word is. Can't even talk about this stuff without inadvertently reinforcing the propaganda of the copyright monopolists. They did the same thing with the word theft.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Why would anyone not do this? Do people enjoy enriching copyright monopolists by paying hundreds of dollars for 24h access to one paper that may or may not have dubious methodology? That's fucking stupid and these paid journals can't go bankrupt soon enough.
- capableweb 5y ago
  If you talk with non-scientists, you'll realize that most people are happy to pay the fees as they don't really understand how things work in the background. While they think they are supporting science by paying the fees, the reality is that everyone is paying the publisher and the publisher takes all the fees to themselves. But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in non-belief.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in non-belief. They gasp in pure joy. Back in school I had a professor who paid out of his own pocket for access to one particular journal in order to bring scientific articles to class. Our library didn't have access to this journal. I was disgusted by how these journals were exploiting him. I looked for a way to fix that and discovered Sci-Hub for the first time. He was overjoyed when I showed him that. Our classes became better, richer. He could finally bring whatever material he felt was important. The damage these copyright monopolists cause cannot be quantified. There's also the usability. When I told my classmates about Sci-Hub, they were also very happy because they no longer had to go through our library in order to access scientific articles. They can just download whatever they want. This is how things should be.
  - bo1024 5y ago
    The top comment on this HN submission at the moment has this misunderstanding.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Just curious, who are these non-scientists who will pay for scientific papers? Journalists? I can't imagine people whose work do not depend on these papers pay the exorbitant fees. And those who need scientific papers for work are generally the ones we call scientists.
yummypaint 5y ago
A finer point often missed on HN is how different publishing is across fields. In physics i have always been able post preprints to the web/arXiv and leave them up indefinitely. Their scientific content is identical to the journal formatted version and they show up in search often before the paid version. This is true even for the historically worst offenders (i.e. Elsevier) Last I heard the situation in chemistry was still completely different. The ACS is also known for bullying cash strapped college libraries into exorbitant and unnecessary journal subscriptions.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  I'm a medical physicist. I have articles on arxiv, and articles in clinical journals like Circulation (which have a huge impact factor, are required to get the techniques "out there" and demonstrate their value, but basically necessitate putting all the detail and maths in the SI, if not in a separate paper). Your statement is very, _very_ true. Physics and maths are ahead of the curve, and in astronomy in particular they hammer papers out at a rate of knots where the arxiv is what matters. Biology, biomedicine, and chemistry are totally different. Everyone uses Word (which I hate) and everyone's formatting looks like shit as a result. The concept that you could have "camera ready copy" is alien. Moreover than that, stuff like a data supplement increasingly needs to be hosted by someone else the further down that train you go. You or I would be happy slapping something up on a static University-run website or linking to it; that gets harder the less technical you get. Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved about particle physics was that everyone helps. Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd ways. That's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial" talk I hear a lot of in my world. Heck, there are multiple groups "competing" in my field on diseases like prostate cancer, which sometimes makes the "losing" group unable to publish their results in a "good enough" journal, and it's not easy to coordinate or organise -- the funding bodies encourage competition. Physicists tend to take the attitude that "there is only one universe to study" and collaborate sensibly; sure, Fermilab and CERN are nominally in competition, say (or ATLAS and the CMS, say) but their competition is more about validation and they explicitly pool resources and ideas such that this is the case. I did my masters' in particle physics and am acknowledged in a textbook chapter I wrote with my then-professor -- take it from me, it's friendly. (I ultimately moved to biology because I felt I was too stupid to progress far in particle, and the medical problems were -- to me -- far easier to solve, or at least make progress on. Doing maths and building things in a hospital is much more of a "USP" than doing maths and building things in a particle physics lab, though I do still love it a lot). The net result is that publication practices are cultural more than anything, and frankly in my experience only really the mathematicians and physicists have enough freedom and balls to do their own thing. I wish the other fields would follow suit, but there are a lot of vested interests trying to prevent that.
aomobile 5y ago
After music and tv, we need some sort of affordable unlimited subscription for books and scientific papers
- VortexDream 5y ago
  No, why? The science is mostly funded by public institutions. Academic research belongs to all of us as a civilization.
- tasogare 5y ago
  No we don't. Sci-hub is doing the job fine. Also just like music and tv, the fragmentation of the market would require on the have multiple subscriptions at the same time.
bborud 5y ago
pretty rich that Elsevier's director of universal access talks about theft while working in an entirely parasitic business.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Before any reader accepts this article's premise as accurate, I suggest they visit /scimag/recent which is a list of the most recently added (requested) papers. From what I have seen the papers requested/added seem consistently skewed toward certain categories of users, e.g., persons interested in computing/neuroscience/psychology or persons interested in social/political issues. Also, browsing major scientific journals such as Science and Nature through /scimag/journals/[journal-no] reveals large portions of the archives for these publications are missing. It could be that the readership of these journals already has access through university/company sucbscriptions, and that readership has not expanded much into the rest of the population despite being potentially available through Sci-Hub.
jakecopp 5y ago
> Get full access to this article > View all available purchase options and get full access to this article. The irony!! I can't access this link!
- josh_fyi 5y ago
  Just $30 to view it!
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    24 hours only, then you gotta purchase access again!
- II2II 5y ago
  Can anyone tell me where I can download a copy? /s More seriously though, my first attempt to request an article for a journal resulted in an article similar to this being delivered. The subject matter was different, but it was better described as an editorial than research. Even though editorials have nearly zero value for academic research, the page fees were identical to research papers. The lack of clarity about what was being delivered was frustrating. The necessity research the articles themselves, prior to purchasing one, simply adds to the cost (e.g. through labour).
- unbad505 5y ago
  https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
n3k5 5y ago
Those 2015/2016 numbers are tiny! I guess a lot of that is no longer representative; e.g. Iran having more downloads than China. Wikipedia has more up-to-date stats about total download numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Usage_and_content_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Usage_and_content_stat...
wdb 5y ago
I still think if the research is paid or subsidised by tax payers money it should be freely accessible. Maybe EU should do something good and make it part of the rules. All wishful thinking of course
- Cenk 5y ago
  That is exactly what the EU is attempting to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S
- andyferris 5y ago
  The one thing that makes me wonder how nations would behave here is government-funded information generally is only available for free in the host country. BBC content is only free in Britain. ABC content is only free in Australia. Is e.g. NPR content gratis outside the US? Similarly, should NSF-backed research be freely available to the USA or the world? (I’m in favour of the world for both science and the BBC-style content, for similar reasons really - it’s generally useful for humanity and it seems spiteful to charge some groups when you produced it with the purpose of giving it away for free in the first place).
- acomjean 5y ago
  Our papers (US NIH funded) are required to be free and publicly available. Of course publishers have wised up to this and now charge us money to publish. But at least anyone who finds the papers on pubmed can read them. Pubmed also tags and indexes the articles so searching is easier. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/
  - ta988 5y ago
    Only after one year.
  - bernardv 5y ago
    Why are commercial publishers even necessary anymore? They are obsolete.
- 5y ago
lousken 5y ago
what's the progress on open access in EU? I can't find any articles mentioning if it's already required or if/when it will be
- advanced-DnD 5y ago
  Don't know about EU in general.. but my articles published in Springer is open access with the German initiative DEAL. I don't know if that counts as open access as the German government is the one paying for it.
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    So the taxpayer - i.e., you (and 82 million other people) - is paying... and your salary was probably already paid by the government if you are working at a university? I can imagine better ways to spend the money than buying open access right from publishers - though the current German government certainly has found even worse ways to waste money...
bluenose69 5y ago
Yes, everyone uses scihub (and author websites, etc) from time to time. A related question is "who pays the per-paper fee". Well, not me, and none of my colleagues. However, I've learned that the fees do get paid, but not by individuals. Rather, it's libraries that are paying, to fulfil interlibrary loan requests for papers in journals with high subscription costs and low readerships. If the number of requests times the price per request is lower than the yearly subscription cost, this can be the only way to stay within budget. Where I work, research grants let me cover journal "page charges", but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor contribute to the library budget. This has always struck me as crazy, for the yearly cost of many journals is under the cost of publishing a single paper. Heck, we have researchers publishing in the journal of whatever, paying several tens of thousands of dollars per year ... and our library cannot afford to subscribe, so we can see our work. Yes, you read that right: in many cases, authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read. Some progress is being made, though. Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. That would seem great, except that they did not increase grants to compensate for the extra cost. Money spent on those fees is money that cannot go to support graduate students. As others have noted (here, and in dozens or hundreds of similar discussion threads), things are different from field to field. I work in a field where it's just as important to read old papers as new ones. That means that the solution of authors posting to their websites is not always viable. Probably a third of the papers I read (in support of teaching) are from people who died long before the web got started.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  >Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. I can't see why the government wouldn't publish all works under an open license when they (ie tax-payers) paid for the research. In the UK we have a national archives that has all the infrastructure - surely it should have all experimental results and all published, and unpublished, conclusions from that work. The only reason I can see not to do that is to lock up research for private gain. That's acceptable if the researchers are prepared to forgo tax-payer funding, otherwise ... This seems like another of those situations where government make terrible contracts on behalf of citizens/subjects/tax-payers.
- 5y ago
karxxm 5y ago
I just wrote a paper which got published on Elsevier and my university has to pay 2900€ now, because I clicked „open access“
- chalst 5y ago
  €2900 is very high, higher than the Royal Society's open access plan. Which journal is it?
  - karxxm 5y ago
    I am very sorry, I mixed it up with another paper.. The publisher where the fee came up was Wiley, for the Computer Graphics Forum. It’s a super duper golden access.
  - krull10 5y ago
    These fees are highly journal and publisher dependent. Check out Nature journals; I believe last I looked Nature Communications was $5500!
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  We need to come up with a way to disrupt this extortion and put these jokers out of the money. Note that I deliberately avoid calling the publishing racket a business, because these criminals-in-spirit and their empires produce nothing of value: they are lining their pockets by exploiting other people’s work, while those being exploited have no choice but to play into the publishers’ hand; enabling the publishers’ power brokerage further their encroachment on public information by gifting them the most precious fruits of their labor.
axegon_ 5y ago
A few takes on this: * Not that long ago people's sole access to papers was through insanely expensive journals, with prices that are absolutely unthinkable for a large portion of the world's population. * Arxiv sort of changed that and a lot of information is widely accessible, granted you don't live in a country with high amounts of censorship. * On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy affects the overall situation very little. People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies and so on. * On a personal note, I don't recall using anything other than Arxiv for the past 8-9 years or so with the exception of one notable example involving a medical paper which was published in another location and it wasn't free. That said I purchased it, even if it set me back around 250 euros iirc. It wasn't work related in any shape or form, it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the authors published for free online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.
- tempay 5y ago
  > it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work FYI authors of published papers don't see any of this money, it all goes to the journal so there isn't really a case to be made for buying papers to support the researchers. Even the peer-review process is unpaid work. If you contact the authors they're allowed to send you copies for free and most are happy to do so.
  - axegon_ 5y ago
    I've never bothered publishing anything, just circumstantially gave a hand several people that have(I don't want my name to pop up in papers for a million and one reasons). I assumed they were since otherwise I saw no logical reason to go for anything other than Arxiv and publish them for free.
    - bo1024 5y ago
      People publish in journals (etc) because of the peer review and reputation. People are much more likely to read, trust, cite a paper that’s been through peer review. Also people are more likely to discover the paper by looking in prestigious venues than if it’s just in the arxiv flood. For promotion and tenure, papers aren’t considered unless they’re published and prestigious venues count much more.
zucker42 5y ago
Anyone find it ironic that this article is apparently under a paywall? Does anyone have a scihub link?
jrochkind1 5y ago
This is a paywalled copy itself, the PDF literally only has the first page. You can, of course, get the rest from sci-hub. Is this intended irony? 10.1126/science.352.6285.508
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
how long before scihub takes the front seat of publishing papers originally so all you have to do is search and its there. if that model works for everyone and everyone is happy, where does dinosaurs like elsevier stand? i think in the history books
pointbazaar 5y ago
funny that the article is behind a paywall...
ta988 5y ago
Arxiv and allies are good. But many journals still do not allow you to pulish a preprint. So if you send to arxiv or other, they will reject your paper because it is not "new anymore". Seen that recently (chemistry).
dt3ft 5y ago
Ironic, to read this article, you have to pay.
fouc 5y ago
Remembering Aaron Swartz
Damogran6 5y ago
I worked incident response for one of these publishers. The grind was constant and unending and they very rarely made decisions to improve the security of the documentation, meaning we were constantly on high alert to respond…usually on holiday weekends…like Labor Day. I’m torn, because I see both sides of it…moreso now that I’m not receiving a paycheck to keep it safe.
echopurity 5y ago
Capitalism is anti-science and anti-progress. People are evolving around it.
- Bostonian 5y ago
  Progress has been faster under capitalism than feudalism, socialism, or communism.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Where do you draw the line between socialism & communism when making that claim?
bernardv 5y ago
Research results and publications ultimately funded by tax-payers should absolutely be freely and openly accessible.
Bostonian 5y ago
I requested a published paper in statistics from my local public library, and they sent it to me the next business day, I think from the University of Massachusetts library system. So going through a public library may be an alternative to downloading an illicit copy.
leobg 5y ago
“View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.” LOL
ofou 5y ago
Even this article is paywalled. What a shame! Thank god we have SciHub. https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
pacman2 5y ago
Link to the complete article: https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
The one thing that's obvious to me now from these comments is that the angriest people have the least insight into what publishing is, why it exists, and why the system continues to work the way it does. Nobody ever explains in these comments to these angry people, so HN just becomes a machine that takes in ignorance and churns out outrage. First off, just because a tax payer paid for research does not mean publishing should be free. That's like saying just because the government pays workers to use pencils, that pencils used by government workers should be free. The company is still doing work, whether it's for a taxpayer or not. It still needs compensation for the cost of doing business. Secondly, commercial publishers perform a vital role, which is why they still exist. If they didn't serve a necessary role people would have stopped using them. This is obvious, because nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head saying you have to publish your research in X place. But nobody wants to think of why these commercial journals are necessary, because it might be the fault of single other than the publishers, so people intentionally stop thinking to avoid the realization. The only name of a publisher that anyone here knows is Elsevier, which further demonstrates ignorance. They're not the biggest publisher, they're not the most expensive publisher, and they aren't the only organization that pursues legal challenges when their content is pirated. But since it's the only name anyone on here has ever heard, they treat them like The Great Satan. That image further polarizes and enforces ignorance of publishing. Payment models vary widely depending on the circumstances and organizations (or individuals). Mostly publishers are trying to find sustainable models to pay for the jobs they perform, which includes hosting, indexing, referencing, editing, proofing, and facilitating peer review, as well as publishing the journals as a whole. If you don't want to pay for any of that, liked over said before, the whole research community would need to do those jobs for free. But even in OSS, companies pay OSS developers to work on code. So somebody has to pay for it. If you're so outraged at the profits of publishers, then get off your ass and build the replacement. But people just like to complain, not fix things.
- jackhodkinson 5y ago
  I like where you are going with this. What would that business look like? Would this be a new journal with a different way of making money or some kind of aggregator service? Seems like an aggregator service would be the most appealing way to access the data for the end user. I'd say these entrenched journals are being very cautious with an aggregator because the raw text data would be super valuable to companies, so they are probably going to try their hardest to limit usage of the data for individual access and bulk access. That's not to say an aggregator is not going to happen.
TrinaryWorksToo 5y ago
The irony of needing to use sci-hub to read an article about sci-hub.
tomxor 5y ago
It's not pirated if the tax payer paid for it... the copyright is invalid. I know it's just semantics, but let's not give evil corp words to make their parasitic scheme seem legitimate.
sflicht 5y ago
I don't see why it would be a controversial bill in Congress to simply exempt scientific publications (broadly construed) from all copyright law. Springer and Elsevier (the latter not even an American company) would be losers, but I doubt they spend more than a couple $mil on lobbying per year between the two of them. The benefit to humanity seems pretty clear. This seems entirely within the scope of Congress's power under the Copyright Clause, and need not be tied up with other more controversial aspects of intellectual property law. There was a time when one could have made a case that permitting copyrights on scientific publications would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (e.g. because only journal publishers were in a position to efficiently provide copy editing, nice formatting, and distribution). None of that has been relevant for decades, so it seems to me that one could even make a case that the status quo violates the Copyright Clause, since enforcing journal copyrights pretty clearly diminishes rather than promotes the progress of science.
- sircastor 5y ago
  There are two reasons this would be controversial, and neither of them are practical. 1) Other industries that are highly dependent on copyright (film, television, music) would viewers this as an existential threat. If Congress is willing to adjust copyright like this, we are also threatened. 2) Currently all politics is highly partisan. Support of an idea from one side invites counter from the other. I think it’s also worth noting that there is seemingly a strong element within one party that pushes hard against institutional science, making it even more difficult to distribute essential research.
hrbf 5y ago
I love the absurdity that this very article is locked behind a paywall.

437 points by azalemeth 5y ago

qsort 5y ago

Behind a paywall. The irony is delightful.

azalemeth 5y ago
Obligatory link: https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
colonwqbang 5y ago
Science publishers are tone deaf beyond belief.

beckman466 5y ago

Elsevier and other capitalist firms that lock up papers are the real pirates in the first place: "Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting." Source: professor Jakob Rigi, https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146 https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146

hirako2000 5y ago
Beautiful. I like the mention of the economic classes at play there. It is convenient for those who can afford all the knowledge they can swallow to find it illegitimate for those who can't afford any quality bites, to get their hands on some.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
The way they compare this literal non-crime to high seas piracy pisses me off to no end. I hate how entrenched this word is. Can't even talk about this stuff without inadvertently reinforcing the propaganda of the copyright monopolists. They did the same thing with the word theft.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Why would anyone not do this? Do people enjoy enriching copyright monopolists by paying hundreds of dollars for 24h access to one paper that may or may not have dubious methodology? That's fucking stupid and these paid journals can't go bankrupt soon enough.

capableweb 5y ago
If you talk with non-scientists, you'll realize that most people are happy to pay the fees as they don't really understand how things work in the background. While they think they are supporting science by paying the fees, the reality is that everyone is paying the publisher and the publisher takes all the fees to themselves. But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in non-belief.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in non-belief. They gasp in pure joy. Back in school I had a professor who paid out of his own pocket for access to one particular journal in order to bring scientific articles to class. Our library didn't have access to this journal. I was disgusted by how these journals were exploiting him. I looked for a way to fix that and discovered Sci-Hub for the first time. He was overjoyed when I showed him that. Our classes became better, richer. He could finally bring whatever material he felt was important. The damage these copyright monopolists cause cannot be quantified. There's also the usability. When I told my classmates about Sci-Hub, they were also very happy because they no longer had to go through our library in order to access scientific articles. They can just download whatever they want. This is how things should be.
- bo1024 5y ago
  The top comment on this HN submission at the moment has this misunderstanding.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Just curious, who are these non-scientists who will pay for scientific papers? Journalists? I can't imagine people whose work do not depend on these papers pay the exorbitant fees. And those who need scientific papers for work are generally the ones we call scientists.

yummypaint 5y ago

A finer point often missed on HN is how different publishing is across fields. In physics i have always been able post preprints to the web/arXiv and leave them up indefinitely. Their scientific content is identical to the journal formatted version and they show up in search often before the paid version. This is true even for the historically worst offenders (i.e. Elsevier) Last I heard the situation in chemistry was still completely different. The ACS is also known for bullying cash strapped college libraries into exorbitant and unnecessary journal subscriptions.

azalemeth 5y ago
I'm a medical physicist. I have articles on arxiv, and articles in clinical journals like Circulation (which have a huge impact factor, are required to get the techniques "out there" and demonstrate their value, but basically necessitate putting all the detail and maths in the SI, if not in a separate paper). Your statement is very, _very_ true. Physics and maths are ahead of the curve, and in astronomy in particular they hammer papers out at a rate of knots where the arxiv is what matters. Biology, biomedicine, and chemistry are totally different. Everyone uses Word (which I hate) and everyone's formatting looks like shit as a result. The concept that you could have "camera ready copy" is alien. Moreover than that, stuff like a data supplement increasingly needs to be hosted by someone else the further down that train you go. You or I would be happy slapping something up on a static University-run website or linking to it; that gets harder the less technical you get. Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved about particle physics was that everyone helps. Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd ways. That's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial" talk I hear a lot of in my world. Heck, there are multiple groups "competing" in my field on diseases like prostate cancer, which sometimes makes the "losing" group unable to publish their results in a "good enough" journal, and it's not easy to coordinate or organise -- the funding bodies encourage competition. Physicists tend to take the attitude that "there is only one universe to study" and collaborate sensibly; sure, Fermilab and CERN are nominally in competition, say (or ATLAS and the CMS, say) but their competition is more about validation and they explicitly pool resources and ideas such that this is the case. I did my masters' in particle physics and am acknowledged in a textbook chapter I wrote with my then-professor -- take it from me, it's friendly. (I ultimately moved to biology because I felt I was too stupid to progress far in particle, and the medical problems were -- to me -- far easier to solve, or at least make progress on. Doing maths and building things in a hospital is much more of a "USP" than doing maths and building things in a particle physics lab, though I do still love it a lot). The net result is that publication practices are cultural more than anything, and frankly in my experience only really the mathematicians and physicists have enough freedom and balls to do their own thing. I wish the other fields would follow suit, but there are a lot of vested interests trying to prevent that.

aomobile 5y ago

After music and tv, we need some sort of affordable unlimited subscription for books and scientific papers

VortexDream 5y ago
No, why? The science is mostly funded by public institutions. Academic research belongs to all of us as a civilization.
tasogare 5y ago
No we don't. Sci-hub is doing the job fine. Also just like music and tv, the fragmentation of the market would require on the have multiple subscriptions at the same time.

bborud 5y ago

pretty rich that Elsevier's director of universal access talks about theft while working in an entirely parasitic business.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Before any reader accepts this article's premise as accurate, I suggest they visit /scimag/recent which is a list of the most recently added (requested) papers. From what I have seen the papers requested/added seem consistently skewed toward certain categories of users, e.g., persons interested in computing/neuroscience/psychology or persons interested in social/political issues. Also, browsing major scientific journals such as Science and Nature through /scimag/journals/[journal-no] reveals large portions of the archives for these publications are missing. It could be that the readership of these journals already has access through university/company sucbscriptions, and that readership has not expanded much into the rest of the population despite being potentially available through Sci-Hub.

jakecopp 5y ago

> Get full access to this article > View all available purchase options and get full access to this article. The irony!! I can't access this link!

josh_fyi 5y ago
Just $30 to view it!
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  24 hours only, then you gotta purchase access again!
II2II 5y ago
Can anyone tell me where I can download a copy? /s More seriously though, my first attempt to request an article for a journal resulted in an article similar to this being delivered. The subject matter was different, but it was better described as an editorial than research. Even though editorials have nearly zero value for academic research, the page fees were identical to research papers. The lack of clarity about what was being delivered was frustrating. The necessity research the articles themselves, prior to purchasing one, simply adds to the cost (e.g. through labour).
unbad505 5y ago
https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508

n3k5 5y ago

Those 2015/2016 numbers are tiny! I guess a lot of that is no longer representative; e.g. Iran having more downloads than China. Wikipedia has more up-to-date stats about total download numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Usage_and_content_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Usage_and_content_stat...

wdb 5y ago

I still think if the research is paid or subsidised by tax payers money it should be freely accessible. Maybe EU should do something good and make it part of the rules. All wishful thinking of course

Cenk 5y ago
That is exactly what the EU is attempting to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S
andyferris 5y ago
The one thing that makes me wonder how nations would behave here is government-funded information generally is only available for free in the host country. BBC content is only free in Britain. ABC content is only free in Australia. Is e.g. NPR content gratis outside the US? Similarly, should NSF-backed research be freely available to the USA or the world? (I’m in favour of the world for both science and the BBC-style content, for similar reasons really - it’s generally useful for humanity and it seems spiteful to charge some groups when you produced it with the purpose of giving it away for free in the first place).
acomjean 5y ago
Our papers (US NIH funded) are required to be free and publicly available. Of course publishers have wised up to this and now charge us money to publish. But at least anyone who finds the papers on pubmed can read them. Pubmed also tags and indexes the articles so searching is easier. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/
- ta988 5y ago
  Only after one year.
- bernardv 5y ago
  Why are commercial publishers even necessary anymore? They are obsolete.
5y ago

lousken 5y ago

what's the progress on open access in EU? I can't find any articles mentioning if it's already required or if/when it will be

advanced-DnD 5y ago
Don't know about EU in general.. but my articles published in Springer is open access with the German initiative DEAL. I don't know if that counts as open access as the German government is the one paying for it.
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  So the taxpayer - i.e., you (and 82 million other people) - is paying... and your salary was probably already paid by the government if you are working at a university? I can imagine better ways to spend the money than buying open access right from publishers - though the current German government certainly has found even worse ways to waste money...

bluenose69 5y ago

Yes, everyone uses scihub (and author websites, etc) from time to time. A related question is "who pays the per-paper fee". Well, not me, and none of my colleagues. However, I've learned that the fees do get paid, but not by individuals. Rather, it's libraries that are paying, to fulfil interlibrary loan requests for papers in journals with high subscription costs and low readerships. If the number of requests times the price per request is lower than the yearly subscription cost, this can be the only way to stay within budget. Where I work, research grants let me cover journal "page charges", but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor contribute to the library budget. This has always struck me as crazy, for the yearly cost of many journals is under the cost of publishing a single paper. Heck, we have researchers publishing in the journal of whatever, paying several tens of thousands of dollars per year ... and our library cannot afford to subscribe, so we can see our work. Yes, you read that right: in many cases, authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read. Some progress is being made, though. Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. That would seem great, except that they did not increase grants to compensate for the extra cost. Money spent on those fees is money that cannot go to support graduate students. As others have noted (here, and in dozens or hundreds of similar discussion threads), things are different from field to field. I work in a field where it's just as important to read old papers as new ones. That means that the solution of authors posting to their websites is not always viable. Probably a third of the papers I read (in support of teaching) are from people who died long before the web got started.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
>Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. I can't see why the government wouldn't publish all works under an open license when they (ie tax-payers) paid for the research. In the UK we have a national archives that has all the infrastructure - surely it should have all experimental results and all published, and unpublished, conclusions from that work. The only reason I can see not to do that is to lock up research for private gain. That's acceptable if the researchers are prepared to forgo tax-payer funding, otherwise ... This seems like another of those situations where government make terrible contracts on behalf of citizens/subjects/tax-payers.
5y ago

karxxm 5y ago

I just wrote a paper which got published on Elsevier and my university has to pay 2900€ now, because I clicked „open access“

chalst 5y ago
€2900 is very high, higher than the Royal Society's open access plan. Which journal is it?
- karxxm 5y ago
  I am very sorry, I mixed it up with another paper.. The publisher where the fee came up was Wiley, for the Computer Graphics Forum. It’s a super duper golden access.
- krull10 5y ago
  These fees are highly journal and publisher dependent. Check out Nature journals; I believe last I looked Nature Communications was $5500!
eurasiantiger 5y ago
We need to come up with a way to disrupt this extortion and put these jokers out of the money. Note that I deliberately avoid calling the publishing racket a business, because these criminals-in-spirit and their empires produce nothing of value: they are lining their pockets by exploiting other people’s work, while those being exploited have no choice but to play into the publishers’ hand; enabling the publishers’ power brokerage further their encroachment on public information by gifting them the most precious fruits of their labor.

axegon_ 5y ago

A few takes on this: * Not that long ago people's sole access to papers was through insanely expensive journals, with prices that are absolutely unthinkable for a large portion of the world's population. * Arxiv sort of changed that and a lot of information is widely accessible, granted you don't live in a country with high amounts of censorship. * On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy affects the overall situation very little. People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies and so on. * On a personal note, I don't recall using anything other than Arxiv for the past 8-9 years or so with the exception of one notable example involving a medical paper which was published in another location and it wasn't free. That said I purchased it, even if it set me back around 250 euros iirc. It wasn't work related in any shape or form, it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the authors published for free online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.

tempay 5y ago
> it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work FYI authors of published papers don't see any of this money, it all goes to the journal so there isn't really a case to be made for buying papers to support the researchers. Even the peer-review process is unpaid work. If you contact the authors they're allowed to send you copies for free and most are happy to do so.
- axegon_ 5y ago
  I've never bothered publishing anything, just circumstantially gave a hand several people that have(I don't want my name to pop up in papers for a million and one reasons). I assumed they were since otherwise I saw no logical reason to go for anything other than Arxiv and publish them for free.
  - bo1024 5y ago
    People publish in journals (etc) because of the peer review and reputation. People are much more likely to read, trust, cite a paper that’s been through peer review. Also people are more likely to discover the paper by looking in prestigious venues than if it’s just in the arxiv flood. For promotion and tenure, papers aren’t considered unless they’re published and prestigious venues count much more.

zucker42 5y ago

Anyone find it ironic that this article is apparently under a paywall? Does anyone have a scihub link?

jrochkind1 5y ago

This is a paywalled copy itself, the PDF literally only has the first page. You can, of course, get the rest from sci-hub. Is this intended irony? 10.1126/science.352.6285.508

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

how long before scihub takes the front seat of publishing papers originally so all you have to do is search and its there. if that model works for everyone and everyone is happy, where does dinosaurs like elsevier stand? i think in the history books

pointbazaar 5y ago

funny that the article is behind a paywall...

ta988 5y ago

Arxiv and allies are good. But many journals still do not allow you to pulish a preprint. So if you send to arxiv or other, they will reject your paper because it is not "new anymore". Seen that recently (chemistry).

dt3ft 5y ago

Ironic, to read this article, you have to pay.

fouc 5y ago

Remembering Aaron Swartz

Damogran6 5y ago

I worked incident response for one of these publishers. The grind was constant and unending and they very rarely made decisions to improve the security of the documentation, meaning we were constantly on high alert to respond…usually on holiday weekends…like Labor Day. I’m torn, because I see both sides of it…moreso now that I’m not receiving a paycheck to keep it safe.

echopurity 5y ago

Capitalism is anti-science and anti-progress. People are evolving around it.

Bostonian 5y ago
Progress has been faster under capitalism than feudalism, socialism, or communism.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Where do you draw the line between socialism & communism when making that claim?

bernardv 5y ago

Research results and publications ultimately funded by tax-payers should absolutely be freely and openly accessible.

Bostonian 5y ago

I requested a published paper in statistics from my local public library, and they sent it to me the next business day, I think from the University of Massachusetts library system. So going through a public library may be an alternative to downloading an illicit copy.

leobg 5y ago

“View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.” LOL

ofou 5y ago

Even this article is paywalled. What a shame! Thank god we have SciHub. https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508

pacman2 5y ago

Link to the complete article: https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

The one thing that's obvious to me now from these comments is that the angriest people have the least insight into what publishing is, why it exists, and why the system continues to work the way it does. Nobody ever explains in these comments to these angry people, so HN just becomes a machine that takes in ignorance and churns out outrage. First off, just because a tax payer paid for research does not mean publishing should be free. That's like saying just because the government pays workers to use pencils, that pencils used by government workers should be free. The company is still doing work, whether it's for a taxpayer or not. It still needs compensation for the cost of doing business. Secondly, commercial publishers perform a vital role, which is why they still exist. If they didn't serve a necessary role people would have stopped using them. This is obvious, because nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head saying you have to publish your research in X place. But nobody wants to think of why these commercial journals are necessary, because it might be the fault of single other than the publishers, so people intentionally stop thinking to avoid the realization. The only name of a publisher that anyone here knows is Elsevier, which further demonstrates ignorance. They're not the biggest publisher, they're not the most expensive publisher, and they aren't the only organization that pursues legal challenges when their content is pirated. But since it's the only name anyone on here has ever heard, they treat them like The Great Satan. That image further polarizes and enforces ignorance of publishing. Payment models vary widely depending on the circumstances and organizations (or individuals). Mostly publishers are trying to find sustainable models to pay for the jobs they perform, which includes hosting, indexing, referencing, editing, proofing, and facilitating peer review, as well as publishing the journals as a whole. If you don't want to pay for any of that, liked over said before, the whole research community would need to do those jobs for free. But even in OSS, companies pay OSS developers to work on code. So somebody has to pay for it. If you're so outraged at the profits of publishers, then get off your ass and build the replacement. But people just like to complain, not fix things.

jackhodkinson 5y ago
I like where you are going with this. What would that business look like? Would this be a new journal with a different way of making money or some kind of aggregator service? Seems like an aggregator service would be the most appealing way to access the data for the end user. I'd say these entrenched journals are being very cautious with an aggregator because the raw text data would be super valuable to companies, so they are probably going to try their hardest to limit usage of the data for individual access and bulk access. That's not to say an aggregator is not going to happen.

TrinaryWorksToo 5y ago

The irony of needing to use sci-hub to read an article about sci-hub.

tomxor 5y ago

It's not pirated if the tax payer paid for it... the copyright is invalid. I know it's just semantics, but let's not give evil corp words to make their parasitic scheme seem legitimate.

sflicht 5y ago

I don't see why it would be a controversial bill in Congress to simply exempt scientific publications (broadly construed) from all copyright law. Springer and Elsevier (the latter not even an American company) would be losers, but I doubt they spend more than a couple $mil on lobbying per year between the two of them. The benefit to humanity seems pretty clear. This seems entirely within the scope of Congress's power under the Copyright Clause, and need not be tied up with other more controversial aspects of intellectual property law. There was a time when one could have made a case that permitting copyrights on scientific publications would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (e.g. because only journal publishers were in a position to efficiently provide copy editing, nice formatting, and distribution). None of that has been relevant for decades, so it seems to me that one could even make a case that the status quo violates the Copyright Clause, since enforcing journal copyrights pretty clearly diminishes rather than promotes the progress of science.

sircastor 5y ago
There are two reasons this would be controversial, and neither of them are practical. 1) Other industries that are highly dependent on copyright (film, television, music) would viewers this as an existential threat. If Congress is willing to adjust copyright like this, we are also threatened. 2) Currently all politics is highly partisan. Support of an idea from one side invites counter from the other. I think it’s also worth noting that there is seemingly a strong element within one party that pushes hard against institutional science, making it even more difficult to distribute essential research.

hrbf 5y ago

I love the absurdity that this very article is locked behind a paywall.