Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

bjoern.brembs.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 160 posts

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#41

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

bcook wrote: post #6

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

A general discussion about piracy seems very off-topic.

If we're talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional access to journals, proper research of a subject is ludicrously expensive. In writing a publication, I generally use about 50-100 citations, and yes, you actually have to read them. And for every one that you did use, there are one or two that you didn't. So, simply putting together a manuscript would cost on the order of $5,000-10,000. In actual practice, this is something like a month of searching and reading papers. To sustain that rate is obviously impractical.

This makes those without institutional access completely deprived of useful access to the world's research. It's a terrible, indefensible situation.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#42

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #32
jacobolus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’…

arXiv? I mean, you're looking at preprints, and you might have a higher dross-to-gold ratio, but can't you do your research there, without the moral dilemma?

arXiv is great, but represents a very small fraction of the total published work, is extremely field specific, and old papers are still very relevant. I find myself regularly relying upon citations from as early as the 1910's.

It's not even close to an alternative.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#43

Post by codedokode »

jacobolus wrote: post #13
bcook wrote: post #6

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’…

If you are not affiliated with Hollywood studios, movies cost $10/each to watch... and so on.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#44

Post by a_bonobo »

khedoros wrote: post #11
msvan wrote: post #5

Civil disobedience is an important form of democracy. Maybe in the future, when all of our calls, messages and identities are monitored in full by our benevolent overlords, we won't be able to practice it anymore. Right or wrong, faraway anti-Western countries have served as counterweights against the West for Snowden, Assange and Elbakyan.

> Maybe [...] we won't be able to practice it anymore. Do you mean by suppressing the action before it occurs? I thought that one of the points of civil disobedience was to get caught, so as to increase visibility of the problem and become a catalyst for change.

A quote from Orwell's essays:

>At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference.

Reflections on Gandhi

http://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/gandhi/english/e_gandhi

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#45

Post by Fomite »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #32
jacobolus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’…

arXiv? I mean, you're looking at preprints, and you might have a higher dross-to-gold ratio, but can't you do your research there, without the moral dilemma?

There are whole fields, some of them rather important, that essentially don't use arXiv.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#46

Post by bcook »

gknoy wrote: post #37
bcook wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article addresses a certain (popular) perspective, not the only perspective. I agree, papers should be cheaper, but should they be universally free via sci-hub... I dunno.

If tax payers fund its construction, it's a bit ludicrous to suggest that they should be unable to reap any benefit from it, especially when the purpose of much research is for the public good.

So, only the citizens who fund the research should have access? That, just like the current high-prices, excludes poor countries/people from access.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#47

Post by thatcat »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #31
nemothekid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I am poor" is a poor moral justification to pirate software, movies & books. Software, movies and books are written and funded by private individuals, and if you are pirating entertainment its wrong. I'm not the moral police, but "I'm poor" isn't a very good excuse. The stand I take with Scientific Papers is much different - these papers are backed by institutions which are commonly tax-payer funded or non-profits.…

"I paid, before hand, to have a movie created, but was never allowed to watch it (for free)" isn't actually all that great a moral justification for pirating a movie, either. But in the case of creating a movie, if I paid to make it happen, first the creators would probably invite me to the first screening, and second, even if they didn't, I could afford to buy a ticket. Scientific research, on the other hand, is pai…

>taxpayers should insist that government research publish results for free

Publishing in open journals costs significantly more (on the magnitude of thousands per paper) so this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#48

Post by bcook »

Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #41
bcook wrote: post #6

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

A general discussion about piracy seems very off-topic. If we're talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional access to journals, proper research of a subject is ludicrously expensive. In writing a publication, I generally use about 50-100 citations, and yes, you actually have to read them. And for every one that you did use, there are one or two that you didn't. So, s…

We argue about the background color of a linked article with little resistance, so I think a post about general piracy within an article about academic piracy is relatively on-topic (but I know that is subjective).

I agree that the current journal/paper fee is crazy, but to say that piracy is the "obvious" answer is short-sighted, in my opinion. I very much enjoy the conversation though.

My experience with academia is very limited, but I happily used sci-hub & libgen when I was researching the Hierarchical Fair Service Curve paper.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#49

Post by fiatjaf »

bcook wrote: post #6

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

Who's not poor here? I have many material goods and earn a lot of money, but I have thousands of debt. I am poor by a lot of criteria. You're not, because you have everything you want by stealing it, you self-declared pirate.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#50

Post by SquidLord »

thatcat wrote: post #47
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I paid, before hand, to have a movie created, but was never allowed to watch it (for free)" isn't actually all that great a moral justification for pirating a movie, either. But in the case of creating a movie, if I paid to make it happen, first the creators would probably invite me to the first screening, and second, even if they didn't, I could afford to buy a ticket. Scientific research, on the other hand, is pai…

>taxpayers should insist that government research publish results for free Publishing in open journals costs significantly more (on the magnitude of thousands per paper) so this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding.

That is a significant and incredibly poorly defended assertion that you're making there, sir.

Given that there are dozens if not hundreds (possibly thousands) of open journals, many of which are heavily digitally based, well tied with distributed storage, and willing to work with any significant publication – the claim that "this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding" doesn't even pass the first smell test.

You don't just get to assert things without support. That's not only not good science, it's terrible argumentation.

Post reply on HN