4 ms·

Sci-Hub tears down academia's “illegal” copyright paywalls

81 points by cinquemb 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago
The article is incoherent. Also, the quotation of the U.N. declaration of human rights is incomplete: > Article 27. > (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. > (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author. Aside from the fact that the UNDHR doesn't directly bind anyone in the U.S. it explicitly protects the "material interests" in scientific productions. Copyright is a human right under the UNDHR. Elsevier's business model is built simply on scientists exchanging their material interest in their publications from the publicity that comes from being published in one of its affiliated publications.
- canjobear 11y ago
  The article talks about that second clause almost immediately after mentioning the first. The argument is that Article 27 says authors have a right to copyright, but Elsevier is not the author of the scientific papers. Of course, I'm sure the legal definition of "author" is pretty flexible.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    It makes no sense to give scientists a material interest (i.e. the right to the financial benefits of something) in their works if you say that nobody else can buy or license that interest. There is no way for them to benefit financially from an interest in a scientific publication if they can't sell or license it to someone else.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Is a fully voluntary transaction what's actually happening between scientists and journals in a majority of cases?
- jacobolus 11y ago
  In many cases, papers from 20 or 50 years ago, which were once the property of small journals run mostly-independently by their editorial boards, are now the property of one of the big journal aggregators, after they bought up all kinds of journals and their archives for relative peanuts. Dead authors of decades-old basic research originally published their papers where they thought they would be spread widely (and often out-of-band distributed preprints or xeroxes to each-other; it’s not like the authors were excessively worried about copyright or decades-later royalties). But now, through factors entirely out of their control and irrelevant to their original preferences, those papers are being locked away in a paywalled archive to support an aggregator’s rent-seeking. Century-long copyright is bad enough for books and songs and films. It’s absolutely disastrous for science. Even today, scientists aren’t publishing in big journals for the “publicity” per se. They’re doing it because they need to for hiring/tenure. Elsevier and their ilk have basically managed to insert themselves in the middle of a big game everyone was playing where previously money was only an incidental part of the game so nobody paid much attention or considered what would happen if actors with malicious intent got involved. Once firmly in place, they started demanding ransom, and it caught everyone else off guard. Essentially everyone else (libraries, researchers, government grant agencies, universities, the general public) would be happier if they were gone, but for the moment no one knows how to get rid of them. The tactics employed by the journal aggregators, such as forcing universities to buy bundles of thousands of irrelevant journals they don’t care about in order to have access to the handful with useful stuff in them, are shameless thuggery.
  - cinquemb 11y ago
    In a twisted sense, the shameless thuggery as you say, has now enabled people to mine / acquire information much easier since now if you want to bypass pay walls, you have to do it for a lot less places than before. The ideas that power sites like sci-hub will only get more resilient, regardless (or because) of the laws. Kind of reminds me of how if you wanted basic info about any random person before the internet, one had to use a lot more resources to find such information and even then, you would have to first know where to look. Now you can pretty much get such information about a significant percentage of the global population with these three urls and some enumeration: http://graph.facebook.com/{{interger} http://graph.facebook.com/{{interger}} http://m.vk.com/id{{interger} http://m.vk.com/id{{interger}} http://blog.sina.com.cn/{{interger} http://blog.sina.com.cn/{{interger}}
- alextgordon 11y ago
  That's an absurd and lazy interpretation of the UDHR, if you don't mind me saying so. These are poor people in developing countries. They don't have money to pay the "material interests" demanded of them. It was obviously not the intention of the UDHR to bar half the planet from access to scientific knowledge.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    "Material interest" means the right to the financial benefits of something, and usually it means a property interest. The UNDHR explicitly calls out "scientific ... productions" as something authors have the right to profit from. What's absurd is looking at that plain language and then deciding there is an exception for poor people in developing countries that appears nowhere in the text. There's nothing subtle about Article 27. The first clause means you can't keep scientific knowledge from people. The second clause means that "scientific ... production[s]" (i.e. knowledge distilled into a work of authorship) are protectable property.
    - visarga 11y ago
      The cost of their "material interests" is too much for society. And we already paid for said research by government grants.
habitue 11y ago
While I'm pretty sure the legal theory being espoused here has no chance in court, the fact remains that what Sci-Hub is doing is a good thing. Hopefully in a few decades when we finally get sane copyright laws, or open access journals become the standard instead of the exception, we'll be able to look back on this differently. For those saying "there are open access journals, you aren't forced to publish with Elsevier" you're wrong. If you want a PhD and they require publications, you publish where there is a tradition of publishing or it doesn't count. If you're looking for tenure, they care about the prestige of the journals you publish in. You can make a political statement if you're already tenured, but most don't have that luxury.
- paulkon 11y ago
  Doesn't this mean that the universities are in bed with the publishers which creates a closed loop around the scientific community and graduate students? How can knowledge expect to flourish if the universities dictate where the papers go for maximal prestige and the publishers paywall the papers for maximal profit?
  - habitue 11y ago
    The universities are complicit in it, but as an individual, you have the option of making a protest after working hard to do the research itself, by not passing your thesis defense or getting tenure, and having a very small impact on publishing practices or you have the option of being complicit in it. Over time, this can change, but right now the costs are very high to protest and the chance of it changing minds is very low.
  - alexnking 11y ago
    I wonder if a possible solution to this problem would be getting universities to require publication to open access journals as opposed to closed ones. Then journals with paywalls would have an incentive to offer open access options in order to keep the largest amount of papers.
    - delphinius81 11y ago
geographomics 11y ago
My university blocks access to sci-hub on the claim that it has previously hosted malware. Apparently it attempted to infiltrate the visiting computer and act as a proxy server and/or grab the user's institutional login credentials, in order to access otherwise pay walled literature. At least, that's what I was told when I complained it was blocked. Fortunately, they left libgen (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/) unblocked - as they weren't concerned about copyright issues, only malware threats - which has an entire searchable mirror of all papers and books downloaded via sci-hub. It's a fantastic, incredibly useful resource and I hope it continues to operate unscathed.
- lcswi 11y ago
  Tor Browser might work for you to circumvent the censorship.
belorn 11y ago
When reading about accessibility of research papers, I am always reminded of the Die Gedanken Sind Frei talk by Eben Moglen, and later how black slaves were forbidden by law to learn reading and writing. We have associated the struggle for human equality with the struggle for freedom of knowledge and we have associated them rightly: they belong together. Because the recognition of individual possibility, to allow each to be what she and he can be, rests inherently upon the availability of knowledge; the perpetuation of ignorance is the beginning of slavery.
wolfgke 11y ago
Relevant: Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... (https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto).

81 points by cinquemb 11y ago

The article is incoherent. Also, the quotation of the U.N. declaration of human rights is incomplete: > Article 27. > (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. > (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author. Aside from the fact that the UNDHR doesn't directly bind anyone in the U.S. it explicitly protects the "material interests" in scientific productions. Copyright is a human right under the UNDHR. Elsevier's business model is built simply on scientists exchanging their material interest in their publications from the publicity that comes from being published in one of its affiliated publications.

canjobear 11y ago
The article talks about that second clause almost immediately after mentioning the first. The argument is that Article 27 says authors have a right to copyright, but Elsevier is not the author of the scientific papers. Of course, I'm sure the legal definition of "author" is pretty flexible.
- rayiner 11y ago
  It makes no sense to give scientists a material interest (i.e. the right to the financial benefits of something) in their works if you say that nobody else can buy or license that interest. There is no way for them to benefit financially from an interest in a scientific publication if they can't sell or license it to someone else.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Is a fully voluntary transaction what's actually happening between scientists and journals in a majority of cases?
jacobolus 11y ago
In many cases, papers from 20 or 50 years ago, which were once the property of small journals run mostly-independently by their editorial boards, are now the property of one of the big journal aggregators, after they bought up all kinds of journals and their archives for relative peanuts. Dead authors of decades-old basic research originally published their papers where they thought they would be spread widely (and often out-of-band distributed preprints or xeroxes to each-other; it’s not like the authors were excessively worried about copyright or decades-later royalties). But now, through factors entirely out of their control and irrelevant to their original preferences, those papers are being locked away in a paywalled archive to support an aggregator’s rent-seeking. Century-long copyright is bad enough for books and songs and films. It’s absolutely disastrous for science. Even today, scientists aren’t publishing in big journals for the “publicity” per se. They’re doing it because they need to for hiring/tenure. Elsevier and their ilk have basically managed to insert themselves in the middle of a big game everyone was playing where previously money was only an incidental part of the game so nobody paid much attention or considered what would happen if actors with malicious intent got involved. Once firmly in place, they started demanding ransom, and it caught everyone else off guard. Essentially everyone else (libraries, researchers, government grant agencies, universities, the general public) would be happier if they were gone, but for the moment no one knows how to get rid of them. The tactics employed by the journal aggregators, such as forcing universities to buy bundles of thousands of irrelevant journals they don’t care about in order to have access to the handful with useful stuff in them, are shameless thuggery.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  In a twisted sense, the shameless thuggery as you say, has now enabled people to mine / acquire information much easier since now if you want to bypass pay walls, you have to do it for a lot less places than before. The ideas that power sites like sci-hub will only get more resilient, regardless (or because) of the laws. Kind of reminds me of how if you wanted basic info about any random person before the internet, one had to use a lot more resources to find such information and even then, you would have to first know where to look. Now you can pretty much get such information about a significant percentage of the global population with these three urls and some enumeration: http://graph.facebook.com/{{interger} http://graph.facebook.com/{{interger}} http://m.vk.com/id{{interger} http://m.vk.com/id{{interger}} http://blog.sina.com.cn/{{interger} http://blog.sina.com.cn/{{interger}}
alextgordon 11y ago
That's an absurd and lazy interpretation of the UDHR, if you don't mind me saying so. These are poor people in developing countries. They don't have money to pay the "material interests" demanded of them. It was obviously not the intention of the UDHR to bar half the planet from access to scientific knowledge.
- rayiner 11y ago
  "Material interest" means the right to the financial benefits of something, and usually it means a property interest. The UNDHR explicitly calls out "scientific ... productions" as something authors have the right to profit from. What's absurd is looking at that plain language and then deciding there is an exception for poor people in developing countries that appears nowhere in the text. There's nothing subtle about Article 27. The first clause means you can't keep scientific knowledge from people. The second clause means that "scientific ... production[s]" (i.e. knowledge distilled into a work of authorship) are protectable property.
  - visarga 11y ago
    The cost of their "material interests" is too much for society. And we already paid for said research by government grants.

habitue 11y ago

While I'm pretty sure the legal theory being espoused here has no chance in court, the fact remains that what Sci-Hub is doing is a good thing. Hopefully in a few decades when we finally get sane copyright laws, or open access journals become the standard instead of the exception, we'll be able to look back on this differently. For those saying "there are open access journals, you aren't forced to publish with Elsevier" you're wrong. If you want a PhD and they require publications, you publish where there is a tradition of publishing or it doesn't count. If you're looking for tenure, they care about the prestige of the journals you publish in. You can make a political statement if you're already tenured, but most don't have that luxury.

paulkon 11y ago
Doesn't this mean that the universities are in bed with the publishers which creates a closed loop around the scientific community and graduate students? How can knowledge expect to flourish if the universities dictate where the papers go for maximal prestige and the publishers paywall the papers for maximal profit?
- habitue 11y ago
  The universities are complicit in it, but as an individual, you have the option of making a protest after working hard to do the research itself, by not passing your thesis defense or getting tenure, and having a very small impact on publishing practices or you have the option of being complicit in it. Over time, this can change, but right now the costs are very high to protest and the chance of it changing minds is very low.
- alexnking 11y ago
  I wonder if a possible solution to this problem would be getting universities to require publication to open access journals as opposed to closed ones. Then journals with paywalls would have an incentive to offer open access options in order to keep the largest amount of papers.
  - delphinius81 11y ago

geographomics 11y ago

My university blocks access to sci-hub on the claim that it has previously hosted malware. Apparently it attempted to infiltrate the visiting computer and act as a proxy server and/or grab the user's institutional login credentials, in order to access otherwise pay walled literature. At least, that's what I was told when I complained it was blocked. Fortunately, they left libgen (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/) unblocked - as they weren't concerned about copyright issues, only malware threats - which has an entire searchable mirror of all papers and books downloaded via sci-hub. It's a fantastic, incredibly useful resource and I hope it continues to operate unscathed.

lcswi 11y ago
Tor Browser might work for you to circumvent the censorship.

belorn 11y ago

When reading about accessibility of research papers, I am always reminded of the Die Gedanken Sind Frei talk by Eben Moglen, and later how black slaves were forbidden by law to learn reading and writing. We have associated the struggle for human equality with the struggle for freedom of knowledge and we have associated them rightly: they belong together. Because the recognition of individual possibility, to allow each to be what she and he can be, rests inherently upon the availability of knowledge; the perpetuation of ignorance is the beginning of slavery.

wolfgke 11y ago

Relevant: Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... (https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto).