6 ms·

Sci-Hub: knowledge as a human right

254 points by lobo_tuerto 4y ago

musicale 4y ago
I doubt many academics oppose sci-hub making the work that they provide to journals for free (or sometimes paying absurd open access fees) available to the general public without paywalls or other annoying restrictions.
geysersam 4y ago
SciHub is a beacon of light. The scientific publishing industry is corrupt and needs to burn.
- junofan 4y ago
  There’s some good. e.g. Nature editors in general have their heads screwed on. How do we preserve that?
  - ecshafer 4y ago
    Why do we need editors for scientific journals? They are an unnecessary gatekeeper, people can read a paper and decide for themselves. The peer review process is independent of the editors. And the system of gatekeepers is what has helped push the publish or perish aspects of academia.
    - eldaisfish 4y ago
      Be careful when wishing for absolutes. Editors serve a vital role as the first line of defence against BS publications. They are vital gatekeepers and separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem is the likes of Elsevier and their outrageous profit margins.
      - raxxorraxor 4y ago
        I think they have the same flaws as newspaper editors, their own bias can lead to false data and science. If they are required we would still need a mechanism for control. We just need a better system for QA in general.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      Is anyone forcing scientists to publish in journals?
      - _yb2s 4y ago
        Yes, science careers are highly competitive, and evaluated based on the journals you publish in. If you don't publish in top journals, you are out.
        endisneigh 4y ago
        You can be a scientist without publishing in top journals.
        nordsieck 4y ago
        > You can be a scientist without publishing in top journals. But you can't be a scientist without obtaining grant money. And publishing - particularly in top journals - is the major way to accomplish that.
        endisneigh 4y ago
        You can be a scientist without grant money, though. Most “scientists” are not published in these so called top journals.
        dncjvhvusy 4y ago
        Last I checked a scientist can be anyone that does research.
        8bitsrule 4y ago
        Research can be done well or poorly. Good research with no outlet is not worth a whole lot more. Fine example: Newton needed an angel to get Principia Mathematica published. It was edited, paid-for and seen through press by Edmond Halley. (Halley was not rich. He was lucky that it sold.) https://web.archive.org/web/20120512123330/http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Halley.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120512123330/http://www-groups...
    - thrdbndndn 4y ago
      I haven't form my opinion on the gatekeeping nature of the academic journals, so I won't comment on that. But editors surely are needed for purposes like, well, editing, and all the administrative tasks? They are at least as useful as the secretaries at your companies (i.e. very).
    - asdff 4y ago
      Editors are essential for jockeying the peer reviewers. It does happen sometimes where you get a malicious peer reviewer. Maybe they don't understand the science, maybe the conclusions disagree with ones from their own work, maybe you are scooping their current work without realizing it, or maybe they just have an axe to grind with your principle investigator. I've seen it happen and it can be ugly, but the editor serves as a backstop here. They can look at what both of you are saying as the adult in the room, and usually they assign a new reviewer. Editors are also the whip for lazy reviewers, since they set the deadlines.
  - civilized 4y ago
    - Academics resign en masse from journal boards for whom they perform unpaid labor and form their own lightweight nonprofit groups. - The purpose of these nonprofit groups is to select submissions for peer review and acceptance to their "journal". - The "journal" can be simply a website with a list of links to the arXiv. Hosting and serving the articles is optional. Versions of this plan have already been successfully executed by academics, perhaps most famously in the editorial revolts against Elsevier's topology journals [1]. The associated nonprofits continue to operate the new open access journals successfully [2,3]. These organizations don't just outsource to arXiv, but you could if you were a group of busy academics who wanted to keep it as simple and lightweight as possible. [1] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=442 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=442 [2] https://msp.org/ https://msp.org/ [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology
- beebmam 4y ago
  Are you also of the opinion that copyright shouldn't exist? If not, how do you reconcile this belief with the right of scientists and publishers to sell their productive labor?
  - imglorp 4y ago
    The publishers are not paying scientists for their labor. That's the problem. They are gatekeeping middle-leeches, impeding humanity's progress by paywalling science.
  - tiagod 4y ago
    1. Scientists usually don't see a dime of the money publishers make selling access to their research; 2. In many cases, publicly funded research is gated behind paywalls; 3. In many (most?) cases, peer reviewer are paid nothing or close to it. 4. Most researchers I know either use sci-hub, other so called illegal sources for papers, or ask the authors for a copy.
    - function_seven 4y ago
      5. Scientific inquiry is about discovering facts about our world, universe, and selves. It’s a different category from creative endeavors like art, literature, film, etc.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    if you were concerned about incomes of scientists, then you would support copyright or patents on scientific discoveries. You would support ability to patent the law of gravity. If you do not, then you atr only concerned about publishers. They dont pay scientists. They dont pay for researchm You support parasites.
  - voz_ 4y ago
    Odd straw man, but I guess I’ll tilt at it a bit. I don’t understand copyright existing beyond a few years after publication, and I don’t understand how a “right” to a work can be sold. It seems to be a system designed to facilitate wealth extraction rather than value creation.
- refurb 4y ago
  The scientific publishing industry is corrupt and needs to burn. What's stopping scientists from just not publishing in those for-profit journals? I mean, it's their paper.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - codebje 4y ago
    Institutions often reward publication in more impactful journals, and careers are built on your publication history. Journals also often require that you assign copyright to them and restrict your ability to publish in more accessible places.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    Universities expect you to have publications in peer-reviewed journals. In many fields there aren't alternatives to for-profit journals, and in fields which do have alternatives, many academics don't know the alternatives exist.
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    I think a common misunderstanding, often held on HN/Reddit, is that the academia themselves also hate journal publishing industry as much. I mean, of course none of us like them, and everyone hates the pressure that you have to publish papers to keep your job or to be promoted. But all these are independent to how the industry makes money and especially very irrelevant to the fact that most of journals aren't open-access. Almost all universities/institutions have subscriptions of majority of journals. And most "proper" journals don't charge you (the authors) a fee to publish. Yes, they usually don't pay you when they asked you to review, which sucks. But the whole thing isn't as bad from a practical perspective. Again it's still a annoyance from time to time, just not that bad. Furthermore, unfortunately, a way to judge how good you're at research would be needed anyway. If the journal publishing industry died overnight, there would be other metric coming up and as toxic. TL;DR: scientific publishing industry is a leech but they leech on the fact scientists/researchers needing a way to build their prestige. Not on them directly. That's why most don't have a too strong opinion or act on it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- truetraveller 4y ago
  Corruption usually involves multiple parties. It really is the universities that are corrupt equally, if not more.
- dilawar 4y ago
  eLife needs a honorable mention here. They are doing pretty good job in open publishing and publish quality research. Now they are taking it up a notch higher and will publish all articles accepted for reviews. Its upto the OP to respond to reviews the way they want. Paper will be published along with all reviews and responses. Reader can figure out the rest.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Context: Updated host name due to sci-hub.se getting nuked.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1618528035329937408 https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1618528035329937408 probably would have made for a better link to submit here.
olliej 4y ago
Better yet: knowledge that was paid for by tax payers should be available to tax payers. The journal business model is astounding: they charge a lot to publish, a lot to read what they publish, they do not pay reviewers, editors, or authors, and then get to claim ownership of what was published. It's not enough for legislation to be "you must have some bs pseudo-open-access document", it should be "no employee of a publicly funded institution shall undertake unpaid labour for a journal, the journal must pay a minimum of 50% of proceeds to the author/institution, etc".
- pca006132 4y ago
  I think the interesting thing is that, apart from those private companies, institutions such as IEEE and ISO also have rediculous paywall, even for standards that should be public... Perhaps the gov have less influence over private companies, but can't they do something with IEEE and ISO?
  - olliej 4y ago
    IEEE publications only have something to publish and only have reviewers because public institutions are allowed to publish to them, and allow to do free labour (paper review is unpaid).
- habitue 4y ago
  Right? It is so mind blowing my one-sided. Like hilariously. Usually there is some mitigating factor or some nugget of value provided that someone can make some convoluted argument is worth the price. But with journals, there's nothing. It's 100% path dependence and coordination problems. No one would ever create this arrangement from scratch today.
- deleted 4y ago
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Ruq 4y ago
Don't like the communist decals on the site, but otherwise looks pretty grand!
- colom 4y ago
  It's relevant to Alexandra Elbakyan's rationale for creating and maintaining the Sci-Hub project: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/04/fighting-for-communism-in-science-bpr-interviews-alexandra-elbakyan/ https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/04/fighting-for-commun...
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    From that link: "AE: Although the Soviet Union collapsed, the communist ideology remained strong, so I grew up in an environment where communism was still an inspiring idea. Hence, I always understood Sci-Hub as a communist project. The first version of Sci-Hub even had a small hammer and a sickle on the website, and if you hovered a mouse over it, text would pop up stating, “The communist society…is based upon common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption” Knowledge today has become the private property of corporations such as the publisher Elsevier. These corporations are making a lot of money, while researchers are poor and exploited. Sci-Hub is against all of this. Knowledge belongs to everyone and all people should have equal access to it. Sci-Hub is fighting for communism in science."
  - arp242 4y ago
    Her political ideas are still nuts though. "Why Stalin is God"[1] is the most marked example; e.g. "He [Stalin] created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG.", or "Someone may disagree by saying: there was a censorship in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible to say anything against Stalin - therefore everyone loved him. However, we must admit: the censorship was done by the people - there must be someone who sends you to prison if you don't love Stalin. Stalin obviously couldn't do this himself, on the contrary, that was done by other people for Stalin, because he was loved very strongly." I'm not even going to spend time addressing this nonsense; it should be obvious to everyone with knowledge of Stalin Russia what's wrong with this. This article is an apologetic for evil. Sci-Hub is used as apologetics for evil. I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub. I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers. I know everyone here loves Sci-Hub, and I like the idea of it too. Everyone can make their own decision based on this, but for me, personally, I find it hard to support a site that explicitly defends evil in such a way. [1]: https://sci-hub.ru/why-stalin-is-god https://sci-hub.ru/why-stalin-is-god
88stacks 4y ago
I completely agree with their mission statement, and I wish there was a way to help accelerate what they are doing, how could we make multiple copies of this site so that it can never get stamped out? One problem I constantly have is that the domain gets blocked, and so I have to switch to a new domain to access the site. If we can make this resistant to any type of censorship, that would be amazing and I feel like would be an amazing way to contribute. Is there a closing software specifically made for this. It’s not really possible to clone the site without the authors help and she has stated she purposely doesn’t share the code so that the software can’t get hacked.
- metadat 4y ago
  Torrents? Sets of data torrents with an open-source frontend?
  - fsflover 4y ago
    Clearnet torrenting could put you in trouble. Perhaps torrents in I2P are more suitable for this.
- fiberhood 4y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_mission_for_scihub_and_open_science_we_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#cite_note-:12-31 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#cite_note-:12-31 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive https://gizmodo.com/archivists-want-to-make-sci-hub-un-censorable-1846898276 https://gizmodo.com/archivists-want-to-make-sci-hub-un-censo...
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    https://phillm.net/torrent-health-frontend/stats-scimag-table.php https://phillm.net/torrent-health-frontend/stats-scimag-tabl...
  - 88stacks 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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endisneigh 4y ago
I agree in principal but not in practice. There’s no effective solution to the free rider problem, thus the need to sell your knowledge and labor derived from said knowledge.
- colom 4y ago
  It's not like other types of authorship. The researchers who write these papers do not get paid for people obtaining and reading their research. Nor do their peers who review their publications for the journals, they do this as unpaid labor. The free riders here are the middlemen who take their pound of flesh and hide almost everything behind paywalls and expensive subscriptions.
- whatever1 4y ago
  The publishers in this case are the free riders. They not only get free content from the authors, free labor from the reviewers. They get to charge the readers but also THE FREAKING AUTHORS for their submissions.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    The authors are voluntarily submitting their work and agreeing to any contractual provisions, no? Scientists are not obligated to publish in journals at all.
    - FridgeSeal 4y ago
      Yes voluntarily. Much the same way you’ll voluntarily do something when someone who holds a position of power over you asks you to do something. As numerous other people have pointed out, there is no small amount of career advancement riding on the back of being published in a journal. Until the culture of publish-or-perish can be removed from universities and publishers can be removed from their position as rent-seeking parasites, this dynamic will continue.
      - endisneigh 4y ago
pieter_mj 4y ago
In the quest to preserve human conciousness, I consider this a sister project with Musk's move to Mars and as I tweeted before one of biggest contributions to humanity worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Since there's no planet B and also no planet A sooner than later, we should put ourselves in the position to be able to move to a terraformed Mars or in temporary Dyson spheres as soon as possible. These types of projects ("Shoulders of giants" all the way down) make me hopeful for the future of humanity. Thank you Alexandra Elbakyan! Calling Musk to prove he's a real philanthropist and buy out the entire scientific publishing industry!
- deleted 4y ago
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faeriechangling 4y ago
Alexandra Elbakyan is a great woman fighting against a corrupt racket obstructing science and access to medical information. She's only an outlaw because the law is evil.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ghoogl 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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ex3xu 4y ago
Two weeks from the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death, I'm wishing he could have lived long enough to see Sci-Hub. Rest in peace.
- fatneckbeard 4y ago
  RIP
- azubinski 4y ago
  Is it those Aaron Swartz who was inspired (to put it mildly) by some other guy, Carl Malamud? And than Aaron hanged himself and Carl feels good and still sells his books, https://www.amazon.com/stores/Carl-Malamud/author/B000APW8Z0?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true https://www.amazon.com/stores/Carl-Malamud/author/B000APW8Z0...? This is a wonderful instructive almost biblical story.
fatneckbeard 4y ago
the hilarious thing is how much phd students and other work-a-day members of academia literally could not get their jobs done without sci-hub, the whole system would just grind to a halt without sci-hub.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Science got along fine without sci hub. It’s great but let’s not exaggerate
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 10000truths 4y ago
    And research got along just fine without Wikipedia. Yet having a comprehensive, easily accessible and free knowledge base is just so damn convenient.
  - radus 4y ago
    Yeah, sci-hub is great, but I'm pretty sure academic research would be fine without it... on account of having been a biology PhD student both before and after the advent of sci-hub.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    "Science" has institutions to pay for the journal subscriptions. As a random human person my life has changed drastically since the late 2020 India legal case. I used to read a dozen papers a week via sci-hub and now I read maybe a 2-3 and none from the last couple years. So science marches on but without public access to the full text articles all we have to go on are the usually low quality science journalism press releases.
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    > Science got along fine without sci hub. Science in the rich countries perhaps, anyway. And if you're at a university.
- 4y ago
toddm 4y ago
I published in refereed journals from 1997 until 2006. I was in academia - the last one, post-academia - and it was (to me) understood that having peer review was at least a gatekeeper for releasing information that might be useful to or otherwise heeded by the public. Maybe. Are there problems with that? Are the prices exceptionally high, especially for academic libraries (I recall that Tetrahedron Letters was on the order of $25K in 1995 for a subscription at UT-Austin)? Yes. But I keep coming back to the standards involved with friendly, neutral, or hostile people vetting your work. It's a higher standard to reach than the free market will entertain, but there is a cost. Keep you on your toes. The staff and editors need to be paid. Reprints - something from my generation, actual hard copies, some of those requiring color and not BW - cost money. It all costs money. Do the authors get something in return? Yes. We get refereed journal article citations on our CVs, and that's invaluable. Love the idea, wish there was a meeting in the middle.
- habitue 4y ago
  The issue is that these days the reprints and the editors and the staff are all obsolete. The valuable part you're pointing at is peer review, which academics do for free. Then the people who have been made redundant by the information age make all the money. This isn't a both sides issue, it's very clearly one sided because all the actual work is outsourced to free labor. There's no reason to meet in the middle, these companies need to die off and distribution should be free and open.
- pasabagi 4y ago
  There definitely is a happy medium. I think the problem is, the current model is way out, where basically everyone (sometimes including editors, usually reviewers) are unpaid, while the journal is expensive beyond reasonable bounds. This system only works because most/all academics are underwritten by the taxpayer, and are willing to put up with a pretty high level of exploitation. I think the logical solution would be just to formalize the fact that taxpayers foot the bill. Make journal access free, earmark funds for editors and staff at universities or research institutions, then just pay that directly out of taxes. It would cost a lot less than the current solution, where the taxpayer pays the wages of the contributors (so the journal doesn't have to), then pays the massively bloated subscription fee, then doesn't even get access in the end.
boyter 4y ago
There are a lot of academic papers I want to read, either to advance my own knowledge or because I am doing a vanity search and want to see where I made some mistakes, or how I can improve things. Without sci-hub I would not be able to get access to a lot of them. A good example being this one https://sci-hub.ru/10.1109/TASE49443.2020.00032 https://sci-hub.ru/10.1109/TASE49443.2020.00032 which I could had no other option than pay an exorbitant amount of money to access https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9405312 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9405312 I don't mind actually paying for things, but the prices they charge are insane. Especially for something were I there only thing I can see is a small footnote that just happens to make what I am interested in pop to the top of search results.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
Do I violate your human rights if I refuse to tell you something you want to know? (I can't get past the ddos protection so I don't know the answer)
azubinski 4y ago
"Sci-Hub is the most controversial project in modern science" :)))))
Haga 4y ago
[dead]

254 points by lobo_tuerto 4y ago

I doubt many academics oppose sci-hub making the work that they provide to journals for free (or sometimes paying absurd open access fees) available to the general public without paywalls or other annoying restrictions.

geysersam 4y ago

SciHub is a beacon of light. The scientific publishing industry is corrupt and needs to burn.

junofan 4y ago
There’s some good. e.g. Nature editors in general have their heads screwed on. How do we preserve that?
- ecshafer 4y ago
  Why do we need editors for scientific journals? They are an unnecessary gatekeeper, people can read a paper and decide for themselves. The peer review process is independent of the editors. And the system of gatekeepers is what has helped push the publish or perish aspects of academia.
  - eldaisfish 4y ago
    Be careful when wishing for absolutes. Editors serve a vital role as the first line of defence against BS publications. They are vital gatekeepers and separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem is the likes of Elsevier and their outrageous profit margins.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      I think they have the same flaws as newspaper editors, their own bias can lead to false data and science. If they are required we would still need a mechanism for control. We just need a better system for QA in general.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    Is anyone forcing scientists to publish in journals?
    - _yb2s 4y ago
      Yes, science careers are highly competitive, and evaluated based on the journals you publish in. If you don't publish in top journals, you are out.
      - endisneigh 4y ago
        You can be a scientist without publishing in top journals.
        nordsieck 4y ago
        > You can be a scientist without publishing in top journals. But you can't be a scientist without obtaining grant money. And publishing - particularly in top journals - is the major way to accomplish that.
        endisneigh 4y ago
        You can be a scientist without grant money, though. Most “scientists” are not published in these so called top journals.
        dncjvhvusy 4y ago
        Last I checked a scientist can be anyone that does research.
        8bitsrule 4y ago
        Research can be done well or poorly. Good research with no outlet is not worth a whole lot more. Fine example: Newton needed an angel to get Principia Mathematica published. It was edited, paid-for and seen through press by Edmond Halley. (Halley was not rich. He was lucky that it sold.) https://web.archive.org/web/20120512123330/http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Halley.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120512123330/http://www-groups...
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    I haven't form my opinion on the gatekeeping nature of the academic journals, so I won't comment on that. But editors surely are needed for purposes like, well, editing, and all the administrative tasks? They are at least as useful as the secretaries at your companies (i.e. very).
  - asdff 4y ago
    Editors are essential for jockeying the peer reviewers. It does happen sometimes where you get a malicious peer reviewer. Maybe they don't understand the science, maybe the conclusions disagree with ones from their own work, maybe you are scooping their current work without realizing it, or maybe they just have an axe to grind with your principle investigator. I've seen it happen and it can be ugly, but the editor serves as a backstop here. They can look at what both of you are saying as the adult in the room, and usually they assign a new reviewer. Editors are also the whip for lazy reviewers, since they set the deadlines.
- civilized 4y ago
  - Academics resign en masse from journal boards for whom they perform unpaid labor and form their own lightweight nonprofit groups. - The purpose of these nonprofit groups is to select submissions for peer review and acceptance to their "journal". - The "journal" can be simply a website with a list of links to the arXiv. Hosting and serving the articles is optional. Versions of this plan have already been successfully executed by academics, perhaps most famously in the editorial revolts against Elsevier's topology journals [1]. The associated nonprofits continue to operate the new open access journals successfully [2,3]. These organizations don't just outsource to arXiv, but you could if you were a group of busy academics who wanted to keep it as simple and lightweight as possible. [1] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=442 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=442 [2] https://msp.org/ https://msp.org/ [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology
beebmam 4y ago
Are you also of the opinion that copyright shouldn't exist? If not, how do you reconcile this belief with the right of scientists and publishers to sell their productive labor?
- imglorp 4y ago
  The publishers are not paying scientists for their labor. That's the problem. They are gatekeeping middle-leeches, impeding humanity's progress by paywalling science.
- tiagod 4y ago
  1. Scientists usually don't see a dime of the money publishers make selling access to their research; 2. In many cases, publicly funded research is gated behind paywalls; 3. In many (most?) cases, peer reviewer are paid nothing or close to it. 4. Most researchers I know either use sci-hub, other so called illegal sources for papers, or ask the authors for a copy.
  - function_seven 4y ago
    5. Scientific inquiry is about discovering facts about our world, universe, and selves. It’s a different category from creative endeavors like art, literature, film, etc.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  if you were concerned about incomes of scientists, then you would support copyright or patents on scientific discoveries. You would support ability to patent the law of gravity. If you do not, then you atr only concerned about publishers. They dont pay scientists. They dont pay for researchm You support parasites.
- voz_ 4y ago
  Odd straw man, but I guess I’ll tilt at it a bit. I don’t understand copyright existing beyond a few years after publication, and I don’t understand how a “right” to a work can be sold. It seems to be a system designed to facilitate wealth extraction rather than value creation.
refurb 4y ago
The scientific publishing industry is corrupt and needs to burn. What's stopping scientists from just not publishing in those for-profit journals? I mean, it's their paper.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- codebje 4y ago
  Institutions often reward publication in more impactful journals, and careers are built on your publication history. Journals also often require that you assign copyright to them and restrict your ability to publish in more accessible places.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  Universities expect you to have publications in peer-reviewed journals. In many fields there aren't alternatives to for-profit journals, and in fields which do have alternatives, many academics don't know the alternatives exist.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  I think a common misunderstanding, often held on HN/Reddit, is that the academia themselves also hate journal publishing industry as much. I mean, of course none of us like them, and everyone hates the pressure that you have to publish papers to keep your job or to be promoted. But all these are independent to how the industry makes money and especially very irrelevant to the fact that most of journals aren't open-access. Almost all universities/institutions have subscriptions of majority of journals. And most "proper" journals don't charge you (the authors) a fee to publish. Yes, they usually don't pay you when they asked you to review, which sucks. But the whole thing isn't as bad from a practical perspective. Again it's still a annoyance from time to time, just not that bad. Furthermore, unfortunately, a way to judge how good you're at research would be needed anyway. If the journal publishing industry died overnight, there would be other metric coming up and as toxic. TL;DR: scientific publishing industry is a leech but they leech on the fact scientists/researchers needing a way to build their prestige. Not on them directly. That's why most don't have a too strong opinion or act on it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
truetraveller 4y ago
Corruption usually involves multiple parties. It really is the universities that are corrupt equally, if not more.
dilawar 4y ago
eLife needs a honorable mention here. They are doing pretty good job in open publishing and publish quality research. Now they are taking it up a notch higher and will publish all articles accepted for reviews. Its upto the OP to respond to reviews the way they want. Paper will be published along with all reviews and responses. Reader can figure out the rest.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

Context: Updated host name due to sci-hub.se getting nuked.

lamontcg 4y ago
https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1618528035329937408 https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1618528035329937408 probably would have made for a better link to submit here.

olliej 4y ago

Better yet: knowledge that was paid for by tax payers should be available to tax payers. The journal business model is astounding: they charge a lot to publish, a lot to read what they publish, they do not pay reviewers, editors, or authors, and then get to claim ownership of what was published. It's not enough for legislation to be "you must have some bs pseudo-open-access document", it should be "no employee of a publicly funded institution shall undertake unpaid labour for a journal, the journal must pay a minimum of 50% of proceeds to the author/institution, etc".

pca006132 4y ago
I think the interesting thing is that, apart from those private companies, institutions such as IEEE and ISO also have rediculous paywall, even for standards that should be public... Perhaps the gov have less influence over private companies, but can't they do something with IEEE and ISO?
- olliej 4y ago
  IEEE publications only have something to publish and only have reviewers because public institutions are allowed to publish to them, and allow to do free labour (paper review is unpaid).
habitue 4y ago
Right? It is so mind blowing my one-sided. Like hilariously. Usually there is some mitigating factor or some nugget of value provided that someone can make some convoluted argument is worth the price. But with journals, there's nothing. It's 100% path dependence and coordination problems. No one would ever create this arrangement from scratch today.
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Ruq 4y ago

Don't like the communist decals on the site, but otherwise looks pretty grand!

colom 4y ago
It's relevant to Alexandra Elbakyan's rationale for creating and maintaining the Sci-Hub project: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/04/fighting-for-communism-in-science-bpr-interviews-alexandra-elbakyan/ https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/04/fighting-for-commun...
- yesenadam 4y ago
  From that link: "AE: Although the Soviet Union collapsed, the communist ideology remained strong, so I grew up in an environment where communism was still an inspiring idea. Hence, I always understood Sci-Hub as a communist project. The first version of Sci-Hub even had a small hammer and a sickle on the website, and if you hovered a mouse over it, text would pop up stating, “The communist society…is based upon common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption” Knowledge today has become the private property of corporations such as the publisher Elsevier. These corporations are making a lot of money, while researchers are poor and exploited. Sci-Hub is against all of this. Knowledge belongs to everyone and all people should have equal access to it. Sci-Hub is fighting for communism in science."
- arp242 4y ago
  Her political ideas are still nuts though. "Why Stalin is God"[1] is the most marked example; e.g. "He [Stalin] created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG.", or "Someone may disagree by saying: there was a censorship in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible to say anything against Stalin - therefore everyone loved him. However, we must admit: the censorship was done by the people - there must be someone who sends you to prison if you don't love Stalin. Stalin obviously couldn't do this himself, on the contrary, that was done by other people for Stalin, because he was loved very strongly." I'm not even going to spend time addressing this nonsense; it should be obvious to everyone with knowledge of Stalin Russia what's wrong with this. This article is an apologetic for evil. Sci-Hub is used as apologetics for evil. I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub. I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers. I know everyone here loves Sci-Hub, and I like the idea of it too. Everyone can make their own decision based on this, but for me, personally, I find it hard to support a site that explicitly defends evil in such a way. [1]: https://sci-hub.ru/why-stalin-is-god https://sci-hub.ru/why-stalin-is-god

88stacks 4y ago

I completely agree with their mission statement, and I wish there was a way to help accelerate what they are doing, how could we make multiple copies of this site so that it can never get stamped out? One problem I constantly have is that the domain gets blocked, and so I have to switch to a new domain to access the site. If we can make this resistant to any type of censorship, that would be amazing and I feel like would be an amazing way to contribute. Is there a closing software specifically made for this. It’s not really possible to clone the site without the authors help and she has stated she purposely doesn’t share the code so that the software can’t get hacked.

metadat 4y ago
Torrents? Sets of data torrents with an open-source frontend?
- fsflover 4y ago
  Clearnet torrenting could put you in trouble. Perhaps torrents in I2P are more suitable for this.
fiberhood 4y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_mission_for_scihub_and_open_science_we_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#cite_note-:12-31 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#cite_note-:12-31 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive https://gizmodo.com/archivists-want-to-make-sci-hub-un-censorable-1846898276 https://gizmodo.com/archivists-want-to-make-sci-hub-un-censo...
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  https://phillm.net/torrent-health-frontend/stats-scimag-table.php https://phillm.net/torrent-health-frontend/stats-scimag-tabl...
- 88stacks 4y ago

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endisneigh 4y ago

I agree in principal but not in practice. There’s no effective solution to the free rider problem, thus the need to sell your knowledge and labor derived from said knowledge.

colom 4y ago
It's not like other types of authorship. The researchers who write these papers do not get paid for people obtaining and reading their research. Nor do their peers who review their publications for the journals, they do this as unpaid labor. The free riders here are the middlemen who take their pound of flesh and hide almost everything behind paywalls and expensive subscriptions.
whatever1 4y ago
The publishers in this case are the free riders. They not only get free content from the authors, free labor from the reviewers. They get to charge the readers but also THE FREAKING AUTHORS for their submissions.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  The authors are voluntarily submitting their work and agreeing to any contractual provisions, no? Scientists are not obligated to publish in journals at all.
  - FridgeSeal 4y ago
    Yes voluntarily. Much the same way you’ll voluntarily do something when someone who holds a position of power over you asks you to do something. As numerous other people have pointed out, there is no small amount of career advancement riding on the back of being published in a journal. Until the culture of publish-or-perish can be removed from universities and publishers can be removed from their position as rent-seeking parasites, this dynamic will continue.
    - endisneigh 4y ago

pieter_mj 4y ago

In the quest to preserve human conciousness, I consider this a sister project with Musk's move to Mars and as I tweeted before one of biggest contributions to humanity worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Since there's no planet B and also no planet A sooner than later, we should put ourselves in the position to be able to move to a terraformed Mars or in temporary Dyson spheres as soon as possible. These types of projects ("Shoulders of giants" all the way down) make me hopeful for the future of humanity. Thank you Alexandra Elbakyan! Calling Musk to prove he's a real philanthropist and buy out the entire scientific publishing industry!

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faeriechangling 4y ago

Alexandra Elbakyan is a great woman fighting against a corrupt racket obstructing science and access to medical information. She's only an outlaw because the law is evil.

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ghoogl 4y ago
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ex3xu 4y ago

Two weeks from the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death, I'm wishing he could have lived long enough to see Sci-Hub. Rest in peace.

fatneckbeard 4y ago
RIP
azubinski 4y ago
Is it those Aaron Swartz who was inspired (to put it mildly) by some other guy, Carl Malamud? And than Aaron hanged himself and Carl feels good and still sells his books, https://www.amazon.com/stores/Carl-Malamud/author/B000APW8Z0?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true https://www.amazon.com/stores/Carl-Malamud/author/B000APW8Z0...? This is a wonderful instructive almost biblical story.

fatneckbeard 4y ago

the hilarious thing is how much phd students and other work-a-day members of academia literally could not get their jobs done without sci-hub, the whole system would just grind to a halt without sci-hub.

endisneigh 4y ago
Science got along fine without sci hub. It’s great but let’s not exaggerate
- deleted 4y ago
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- 10000truths 4y ago
  And research got along just fine without Wikipedia. Yet having a comprehensive, easily accessible and free knowledge base is just so damn convenient.
- radus 4y ago
  Yeah, sci-hub is great, but I'm pretty sure academic research would be fine without it... on account of having been a biology PhD student both before and after the advent of sci-hub.
- superkuh 4y ago
  "Science" has institutions to pay for the journal subscriptions. As a random human person my life has changed drastically since the late 2020 India legal case. I used to read a dozen papers a week via sci-hub and now I read maybe a 2-3 and none from the last couple years. So science marches on but without public access to the full text articles all we have to go on are the usually low quality science journalism press releases.
- yesenadam 4y ago
  > Science got along fine without sci hub. Science in the rich countries perhaps, anyway. And if you're at a university.
4y ago

toddm 4y ago

I published in refereed journals from 1997 until 2006. I was in academia - the last one, post-academia - and it was (to me) understood that having peer review was at least a gatekeeper for releasing information that might be useful to or otherwise heeded by the public. Maybe. Are there problems with that? Are the prices exceptionally high, especially for academic libraries (I recall that Tetrahedron Letters was on the order of $25K in 1995 for a subscription at UT-Austin)? Yes. But I keep coming back to the standards involved with friendly, neutral, or hostile people vetting your work. It's a higher standard to reach than the free market will entertain, but there is a cost. Keep you on your toes. The staff and editors need to be paid. Reprints - something from my generation, actual hard copies, some of those requiring color and not BW - cost money. It all costs money. Do the authors get something in return? Yes. We get refereed journal article citations on our CVs, and that's invaluable. Love the idea, wish there was a meeting in the middle.

habitue 4y ago
The issue is that these days the reprints and the editors and the staff are all obsolete. The valuable part you're pointing at is peer review, which academics do for free. Then the people who have been made redundant by the information age make all the money. This isn't a both sides issue, it's very clearly one sided because all the actual work is outsourced to free labor. There's no reason to meet in the middle, these companies need to die off and distribution should be free and open.
pasabagi 4y ago
There definitely is a happy medium. I think the problem is, the current model is way out, where basically everyone (sometimes including editors, usually reviewers) are unpaid, while the journal is expensive beyond reasonable bounds. This system only works because most/all academics are underwritten by the taxpayer, and are willing to put up with a pretty high level of exploitation. I think the logical solution would be just to formalize the fact that taxpayers foot the bill. Make journal access free, earmark funds for editors and staff at universities or research institutions, then just pay that directly out of taxes. It would cost a lot less than the current solution, where the taxpayer pays the wages of the contributors (so the journal doesn't have to), then pays the massively bloated subscription fee, then doesn't even get access in the end.

boyter 4y ago

There are a lot of academic papers I want to read, either to advance my own knowledge or because I am doing a vanity search and want to see where I made some mistakes, or how I can improve things. Without sci-hub I would not be able to get access to a lot of them. A good example being this one https://sci-hub.ru/10.1109/TASE49443.2020.00032 https://sci-hub.ru/10.1109/TASE49443.2020.00032 which I could had no other option than pay an exorbitant amount of money to access https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9405312 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9405312 I don't mind actually paying for things, but the prices they charge are insane. Especially for something were I there only thing I can see is a small footnote that just happens to make what I am interested in pop to the top of search results.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago

Do I violate your human rights if I refuse to tell you something you want to know? (I can't get past the ddos protection so I don't know the answer)

azubinski 4y ago

"Sci-Hub is the most controversial project in modern science" :)))))

Haga 4y ago

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